Enriching the comfortability emotion on website interface design using Kansei engineering approach

Abstract

Today, website has become an important virtual identity to everyone including corporate companies or organizations and is used for many purposes such as electronic commerce and business marketing. The entire website has to be competetive to retain their users and to meet their objective as well as website survival. Stemming from Nielsen research, a website must be a usable website to capture the user’s attention. For this reason, many researchers have been working on exploring the meaning of web usability as well as enhance website capability. However, the web usability findings were more on website efficiency which focuses more on functionality and cannot measure user satisfaction. A good website should provide not only useful functions, but also support comfortable interaction between user and website. This new paradigm was defined as web comfortability. This research explored the new paradigm by evaluating the top eight Malaysian websites using Kansei engineering as proven successful product development methodology. As a result, this research will provide design guidelines for any web designer to design any website that can evoke user’s comfortability emotion expectations.