Exploring Attributes of Skins as Potential Antecedents of Emotion in HCI

Following research on the emotional effects of physical artifacts in organizational settings, we suggest that studying emotion in the context of using interactive applications can benefit from looking at how the application is evaluated by users on three distinct attributes: instrumentality, aesthetics, and symbolism. We conducted an exploratory experiment to assess the viability of a subset of this model for the field of human-computer interaction, in the context of users' personalization of PC-based entertainment applications. Users exhibited a variety of tastes when choosing an interface for their application. The results of closed- format and open-format questionnaires reveal that the dimensions of usability, aesthetics, and symbolism are distinct of each other. Each of these dimensions contributed to explaining users' satisfaction and pleasant interaction experience. In line with the premises of Aesthetic Computing, the contribution of aesthetics to users' personalization of their computing environments is particularly evident.