Interaction Design, 6th Edition

Chapter 6EMOTIONAL INTERACTION

• 6.1 Introduction
• 6.2 Emotions and Behavior
• 6.3 Expressive Interfaces: Aesthetic or Annoying?
• 6.4 Affective Computing and Emotional AI
• 6.5 Persuasive Technologies and Behavioral Change
• 6.6 Anthropomorphism

 

Objectives

The main goals of this chapter are to accomplish the following:

• Explain how our emotions relate to behavior and the user experience.
• Explain what are expressive and annoying interfaces and the effects they can have on people.
• Introduce the area of emotion recognition and how it is used.
• Describe how technologies can be designed to change people's behavior.
• Provide an overview on how anthropomorphism has been applied in interaction design.

6.1 Introduction

When you receive some bad news, how does it affect you? Do you feel upset, sad, angry, or annoyed—or all of these? Does it put you in a bad mood for the rest of the day? How might technology help? Imagine a wearable technology that could detect how you were feeling and provide suggestions geared toward helping to improve your mood, especially if it detected that you were having a real downer of a day. Would you find such a device helpful, or would you find it unnerving that a machine was trying to cheer you up? Designing technology to detect and recognize someone's emotions automatically from sensing aspects of their facial expressions, body movements, gestures, and so forth, is a growing area of research often called emotional AI or affective computing