I watched some talks at the World Usability Congress and found them quite interesting. While not all of them were my cup of tea due to some being a bit too technical, I did manage to take away something valuable from each one.
One presentation, titled “Measuring Emotional Engagement” by Bill Albert, stood out as my favorite, and I’d like to focus on it in this blog post. Albert discussed emotions in general, how we can test them in usability trials, and why understanding customer emotions during product testing is crucial. He highlighted common UX emotions like engagement, stress, frustration, affect, trust, and confidence. Measuring emotions, however, isn’t always easy due to the challenge of dealing with potentially noisy data. This is partly because not everyone has the same definition for each emotion. Communicating about emotions can be tricky as they are abstract, and some emotions, like trust, may be particularly elusive to analyze.
What caught my interest was the array of research tools used in UX for measuring emotions, something I wasn’t aware of before. Albert shared an example of real-time emotional measurement through eye tracking during usability tests and introduced other tools like self-reports, facial expression analysis, GSR, and behavioral observations.
I also appreciated the practical aspect of Albert’s talk. He provided insights into planning a usability test that focuses on measuring emotions, emphasizing the importance of asking questions such as: “What emotions do I care about? What tools do I need? What am I going to do with the results?” Moreover, he illustrated his points with a practical example that addressed potential risks.
In conclusion, I believe that incorporating emotion measurement into usability tests can be very helpful. As I plan to carry out usability tests for my Master’s thesis, it’s valuable to keep in mind the insights from the World Usability Congress.
more about this topic:
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/2786567.2792902
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/10447318.2023.2221600?needAccess=true
