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Emotion and Enjoyment in Technology Design

The traditional focus of usability has been ensuring systems and products are engineered to "fit" the user: products must be effective, efficient, and satisfying. More recently, theorists and practitioners are extending our understanding of human-computer interactions to suggest that usability is not the exclusive aim of product design. Whilst it is vital, it must also be complemented with design features that create positive experience.

Note: Recently, theorists have had much debate as to whether the focus of the new school of thought should be "pleasure", "engagement", "fun", "immersion", "satisfaction", or any other positive experience. This briefing does not address this debate - rather, it simply supposes that there's more to technology design than usability.

How do emotions play a role in technology?

The HCI community are waking up to something that product designers have known for ever: things should be nice. Car manufacturers have traded on the beauty of the forms they produce to elicit emotion in people and encourage sales.

In the field of technological interactions, the principle is no different. To maximise usage, advocacy, and ultimately bottom-line sales, interfaces should be designed with focus on positive emotions (pleasure) in addition to usability.

With regard to human-computer interactions, Jordan (1999) has categorised pleasure in a useful way:

• Physio-pleasure
  Pleasure derived from the sensory organs, such as quality materials to the touch.
• Socio-pleasure
  Pleasure derived from the product and how it affects their social identity or relationships with others
• Psycho-pleasure
  Interfaces that allow things to be completed in a satisfying way, those that automatically detect and correct errors all elicit pleasure that pertains to people's cognitive and emotional reactions
• Ideo-pleasure
  Pleasure derived from people's values, such as artistic quality in a design, or ecologically sound products.

Donald Norman (2004) has a similar breakdown, on a hierarchical basis, of Visceral, Behavioural and Reflective levels of processing that are stimulated by appearance, effectiveness in use, and self-image respectively.

Are there any principles to rely on?

The theory behind emotion in design is very interesting, but doesn't often stray into pragmatic design solutions. There are no structured design methodologies in existence, rather a set of testing methodologies, and a raft of principles (design patterns). Some of these are:

Using human forms such as faces and smiles are inherently pleasurable as interface components
Aesthetic design is important, but subjective. Allowing users to modify the aesthetic design of their products (PC desktops, mobile phone covers, web portals) will al encourage emotional response. Note that users will not select aesthetic treatments that hamper usability, and so the default should never be either. Whilst it has been shown that users will tolerate poorer usability if other design features evoke positive emotions, this should hardly be a design goal.

Narrative
Users respond positively to stories, cause-and-effect, social allegories of otherwise utilitarian actions (e.g. "deleting" a file is not as compelling as placing it in a "rubbish bin", and setting up a usage profile is not as compelling as having a social actor talk you through it.)

Appeal to all senses
Humans have always sought out stimulation; when left in isolated conditions, we event hallucinate sensory stimulation to meet this end. Interfaces that focus on multiple senses will be appealing (though never used if this diminishes usability or accessibility).

How do we create enjoyment in games?

Mikhail Csikszentmihalyi has identified the concept of "flow" - sportsmen call it "being in the zone" - where a persons' ability and the challenge they are undertaking are perfectly balanced. In these situations, individuals are fully immersed, often unaware of external events. It is a pleasurable experience.

The implications of "flow" are that challenges must be constantly moderated in order to match the individuals increasing ability. In games, play must be kept at a suitable level (either artificially, by player-selected settings, or organically, via responsive game design).

Challenge creates enjoyment

Chris Crawford, stalwart game theorist, remarks that the point of play is the challenge - not just the goal. For instance, there are often "loopholes" in a game that help you reach the goal quicker (e.g. moving closer to the screen when aiming with a infrared pointer or finding a bullet-proof hiding spot in a shooting game). However, these tricks are removing the challenge. As a consequence, the games themselves become valueless. They are no longer played.

If the point is challenge, we must define what categories of challenges exist and ways we can engineer them. Some have been suggested:

• Cerbellar challenge
  The cerebellum, an area of the brain, plays a key role in the control of motor functions. Some sports such as shot-put may be considered purely cerebellar challenges: they require little feedback or accuracy.
  
• Sensorimotor challenges
  Often referred to as "hand-eye coordination", sensorimotor challenges reward users for responding accurately to stimulus. Whether the accuracy is needed spatially (e.g. dodging missiles) or temporally (hitting buttons on a beat), the challenge is posed at a similar level.
  
• Pattern Recognition
  Very few games are purely pattern-recognition challenges, but it often features as a component of a greater challenge. Recognising the type of object presented in-game (good, bad, dangerous, heath-giving etc) is a challenge with reward in of itself. Equally, recognising arrangements in chess or other strategy games is necessary for successful negotiation.
• Sequential Reasoning
  Predicting and evaluating the likely outcome of a series of operations (perhaps solving the problem of finding a key to a lock by visiting numerous locations in order of the likelihood of the key being there…) is a challenge, often notably more enjoyable to some people over others.
• Resource Management
  Particularly in strategy games (for instance Football Management games), the player challenge exists in optimising the use of co-dependent resources in order to maintain or improve performance. In action games, resource management also occurs, whereby players (for instance) accept trade offs between their health levels, their ammunition, and maybe the number of tokens they have collected, in order to maximise either their score, or their progress through the game.
• Social Reasoning
  A increasingly prominent feature of gaming and enjoyment, in games like the Sims, and other games with high levels of artificial intelligence, players are rewarded for making accurate social appraisals and acting in accordance with these. This new focus of gaming has often been geared to increasing the number of female gamers.

Challenge wont create enjoyment without:

Rules
Rules are the structure of an activity, notably games. Without them, effective challenge is impossible. According to Salen and Zimmermann (2000), they must be:

• Limits that define possible actions
• Explicit and unambiguous
• Shared by all participants
• Fixed
• Binding

Feedback
It is also important to stress that challenge can only be employed as a prompt for extended use if the feedback is sufficient. Feedback may be very simple ("Well done!") or more subtle (environmental changes to indicate progress). Equally, the feedback can be utilitarian (a score increase is a very usable feedback) or have emotional impact in of itself (enchanting sound effects, increase in altitude in a climbing game, smiling from other game characters).

Social aspects of enjoyable technology

Many people enjoy themselves alone, from reading to playing videgames. Even then, these solo activities often have a social function. Discussing books or comparing highscores often takes place. Often, people take enjoyment from technologies together. When there are multiple participants, features that contribute to enjoyment tend to emerge that are not contained within the technology itself:

Etiquette
They are not explicit rules, but nonetheless they are a framework of participation that are understood, and often is a reward in of itself for extended participation. Etiquette is one way that games can define communities and encourage socialisation.

Real world proxies / replacements
Much beyond etiquette, people are increasingly taking part in highly-social games or computer-supported activities that enhance (or replace) their relationships. As an extension of bragging about success in Monopoly, participants value the opportunity to brag how close they were to death from their acquaintances in multiplayer shooting games. In a further development Massive Multiplayer Games (such as Lineage, currently played by 4 million people worldwide) are being used primarily as social environments, as opposed to this being an emergent feature.