Beyond Usability: A Rubric to Evaluate the Emotional Impact of E-commerce Homepages

Given the popularity of usability testing, why do people still feel uncomfortable interacting with websites? Could it be because usability testing does not address the user experience but rather tends to deal with efficiency and navigation but seldom with experience? The current implementation of usability research heavily relies on quantitative analysis when the nature of the issue is qualitative. Few studies have adequate scope to include both quantitative and qualitative analysis. Activity theory describes several elements involved in human activity. By incorporating Activity Theory with quantitative and qualitative measures of user experience, the designer will be better able to assess the affective impact of a website design. The purpose of this study is to create a suitable instrument to measure and predict affective and experiential aspects of web interaction. The resulting instrument will provide affective data relevant to the overall emotional and experiential response to a website.

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