Foster The Feel Good Factor

You've got an idea for a great Website. You write your content, add an interesting graphic or two, make sure your meta tags and alt text do their job, get your audience ...and that's it, right?

Wrong.

Of course, all these elements are important. But mounting evidence suggests that how you make your users feel is as crucial as what you tell them. And it's the appearance of your user interface that can significantly affect their mood. So, if you want your users to feel positive about your site, and motivated about returning, you'll need to understand which elements of your interface can affect the mood of your visitors.

Why are Users' Feelings Important?

Emotions influence behaviour.

There's growing demand for research into the effect of the interface on users' emotional responses. Why? Because emotions influence behaviour: they

(Oostendorp et al, 1999). This has huge implications for ecommerce, Internet banking and educational software, as commercial organisations are now beginning to realise. As Rose (2001) points out:

Consequently, it is primarily the ecommerce sector that leads the way in research, and the current studies suggest that target emotions can be induced via the interface. Kim and Moon (1998), for instance, found that manipulating visual design factors of the customer interface in an ecommerce system could induce a target emotion such as trustworthiness, while Rose (2001) found that affective responses could be induced using multimedia to influence investment decisions. But it's not all smiles and sales -- your page could just as easily have a negative effect! Kraut et al's (1998) study found that heavy use of the Internet was associated with increases in depression and loneliness.

So I need to pay attention to visual design factors and multimedia elements, but how do I know what works?

The Importance of Colour

In 1996, Jakob Nielsen observed that because

In such a new and dynamic area of research, this is still largely the case, but today there is some general consensus about what works in the industry. High quality graphics are recognised as having real importance in the creation of a pleasant experience. And there's also real evidence that colour has a significant role to play in influencing emotions.

That we associate colours with emotions is without question -- how often have you heard people say 'I'm feeling blue', 'I'm seeing red' or 'I'm in a black mood'? This has been exploited in advertising for years, with colours used to encourage particular associations with products. Pink, representing softness and gentleness, is used for baby and bath products while orange, symbolizing potency, power and vigour, is frequently used in the packaging of health products and vitamins, protein-packed snacks, energy-giving drinks, and oven cleaners.

Research supports these associations: Jolley and Thomas (1994) found that moods in artworks were read through colour associations, and Ellis (1997) found that even from childhood pink is associated with peaceful/happy; blue with peaceful/sad; green with happy and black with sad/angry.

It is revealing that artists suffering from autism (in which a central characteristic is a lack of interest in communicating with others) seem to have no interest at all in portraying colour in their pictures (Thomas and Silk 1990 p135). Their lack of regard for colour seems to underline the idea that for the rest of us, colour is a useful tool in the depiction of feelings and moods on paper. There is no reason to suppose that this association of colour with mood is any less potent when the colours are on a computer screen, and that by using appropriate colours on-screen, the associated moods will be communicated to the user in just the same way as in product, TV and magazine advertising.