Designing websites to elicit emotions and enhance comprehension of web-based information
Creators: name: Riaz, Amir
Publisher: name: The Australian National University
Year: 2015

description: Websites are increasingly becoming a primary source of information for a significant number of people. Governments are responding to this trend by investing large sums of money and resources in developing websites, especially that provide information to the public to improve their knowledge of specific topics. However, the increasing amount of information available on websites is having an adverse impact on online users' comprehension of web-based information. This effect may adversely influence the amount of knowledge that online users can acquire from these websites and, in turn, hinder information providers' objective to increase users' knowledge. Despite huge investments on developing and maintaining informational websites, there is scant research on how to improve the levels of online users' comprehension of web-based information. Drawing upon theories of emotions from Evolutionary Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, and image-text comprehension model as well as literature from website design, psychology and neuroscience disciplines, this thesis investigates website design features that can induce desired emotions in online users and enhance their levels of comprehension of web-based information. It specifically addresses the following three research questions; (1) Do website design features that incorporate biophilia and biophobia effects enhance online users' information recall by evoking their emotional responses?, (2) How does the emotionality of website design features and their perceived relevance to given textual information influence online users' emotional responses and their comprehension of web-based information?, and (3) Can neural correlates of emotional responses elicited by website design be used to accurately predict comprehension of web-based information? Three studies were conducted to investigate these questions. An online field experiment was conducted to investigate the first research question (Study 1) and laboratory experiments were conducted to investigate research questions two and three (Study 2 and 3). Analysis of variance (ANOVA) and structural equation model (SEM) were used to analyze the collected data. Further, for Study 3, the event-related potential (ERP) technique was used to analyze the brain activity data that was recorded from the scalp using electroencephalography (EEG) equipment. The data was analyzed using EEG lab and ERP lab (software packages that run in the Matlab environment). This thesis contributes to both theory and practice. It confirms and extends prior information systems (IS) literature on the effectiveness of IS theorization based on Evolutionary Psychology (i.e., Kock &amp; Chatelain-Jardon, 2011). It provides a sound theoretical basis to investigate how to improve online users' task performance such an recall of web-based information. The study also sheds light on the need to be careful when using theories from neuroscience to investigate IS phenomenon by demonstrating that neural correlates of emotion eliciting website design can be different depending upon the given tasks that online users are engaged in. On a practical front, it provides guidelines for web developers and information providers for the development of effective websites which can enhance the levels of online users' comprehension of web-based information.