Recognising the Importance of Visual Elements in Experience Design for Motivation

Abstract

The concept of experience design which focuses on providing an unforgettable experience for the end-user was started to be discussed in the symposium in the recent years. In order to face the increasing competitions in the market, most designers explored methods to satisfy users' wants and desires through the experience of design consumption. Designers sought for solutions to increase the interaction and motivation by collecting users' feedback, user experiences management, and continuous innovation. To manage users' experience, some scholars suggested the perception of user on the design is one of the important aspects they have to consider. To generate the perception of users, various aspects of the experience design were involved, e.g. usability, mood and feel, etc. Many studies have already investigated the directions under the usability and the research result contributed the generation of some creative designs. It is possible to further investigate the other directions, for example, creating the mood and feel by visual elements (included points, lines, curves, etc.) in experience design. There were some studies explored that visual elements took main role on the creating perception. This paper aimed to investigate how the visual elements creating perception in design experience and how it enhanced the users' interactions and motivations. In this paper, a qualitative research was conducted to examine how the visual elements in experience design influence the users' emotional changes and perceptions of the experience design. And then, the way of the visual elements in experience design encouraged the users' motivations were also investigated. Participants were invited to describe their experience, mapped out their emotional changes those caused by the experience and identify their motivated action after the design experience. It was found that visual elements created users' perceptions to affect interaction behavior, relationships between visual elements and motivation is strongly mediated by eliciting certain types of emotional behavior. This connection provided understandings on how designers' efforts work in visual elements actually influence users' experience in the design consumption. The importance and role of visual element in experience design were explored. The influences on the emotion of the users among the different categories of visual elements were compared.