Exploring the impact on user information search behaviour of affective design: an eye-tracking study

Affective design has made a significant contribution to user experience and satisfaction in human-computer interaction. As an important developing research field, user-centred information search system design should benefit from the theories and approaches of affective design. It is especially beneficial to the interactive health information search, where the search tasks can give users negative emotions. This paper explores the impact of affective design on health information search behaviours in terms of online interaction, query formulation and result selection through an eye-tracking user study. Eye-tracking experiment results show that affective design has a positive impact on the user’s information search behaviour. For example, the users tend to form more precise search query formulation, spend more time on the search, and explore and find more relevant results for the task, and they interact more with the affective design features on the search interface.