The Effects of Menu Design on Users’ Emotions, Search Performance and Mouse Behaviour

One should not ignore the fact that affect (or emotion) plays an important role in cognition and learning. For instance, badly designed interface brings negative impact on user’s performance if the user does not find enjoyment in his or her overall experience with the system. Automatic analyses of user behaviour in adaptive e-learning system development is important and it would be good to have an effective yet flexible computation metrics to learn user’s emotion, so that necessary adaptation could be provided to enhance user experience. The introduction of keyboard and mouse analyses shed a light to the development of a non-intrusive and inexpensive automated emotion detection method, as these peripherals are part of the computer system. This research investigates the effects of menu design on users’ emotion, search task performance and their mouse behaviours. The results show that the effects of menu design on users’ search task performance and their mouse behaviours are statistically significant. Menu design factors do affect users’ emotions, which they feel uncomfortable with bad combination of colours, smaller font size, text without code, abbreviated text, use of ambiguous term, random display and the need to scroll. However, their discomfort with the bad menu design does not necessarily affect their search job performance.