VIA Interaction

Friday, August 26, 2005

What's your PAQ?

The people we've worked with over the past two or three years know that we are increasingly concerned with the way our Web designs look, not just the way they function.

I wrote a white paper about it a few years ago -- Beyond usability: User experience.

In the years since, though, it has not gotten any easier to figure out definitively whether we have been succeeding, although designs like ones we released earlier this year for OhioHealth seem to be a success.

However, there is more data accumulating to support the notion that the emotional effect of your design is an important contributor to whether people will like your site.

In a paper published in this month's Communications of the ACM, "The Importance of Affective Quality," Ping Zhang and Na Li of Syracuse University demonstrate that a Web site's perceived affective quality (PAQ) "has a significant positive impact on both PU [perceived usefulness] and PEOU [perceived ease of use]."

Perceived affective quality did not have a direct impact on an important other measure -- behavior intention to use the site. However, as Zhang and Li point out, it is well established in CHI studies that perceived ease of use has a significant impact on perceived usefulness, and perceived usefulness has a significant positive impact on behavior intention.

Follow that?

Put it this way (as Zhang and Li, borrowing from Donald Norman, say):

"Pleasing things work better."

posted by Tim Beidel at 8/26/2005 05:44:00 PM

---