Users’ Emotional Valence, Arousal, and Engagement Based on Perceived Usability and Aesthetics for Web Sites

In addressing user experience issues, users’ perceptions and emotions need to be considered important. This study examines the relationships between perceived usability/aesthetics and emotional valence/arousal/engagement through an experiment using 15 existing websites from various domains and questionnaire items developed to measure users’ responses. According to the experimental results, both perceived usability and perceived aesthetics were positively correlated with emotional valence and negatively correlated with emotional engagement. No specific relationship was found between perceived usability/aesthetics and emotional arousal. Perceived aesthetics potentially had a greater impact on valence than perceived usability. Unlike valence, engagement could be more influenced by perceived usability than by perceived aesthetics. These findings can be utilized as bases for applying users’ emotional responses in each dimension to the product-use situations in the chain of perceptions, emotions, and behaviors.