Understanding the transitions between web interfaces designed to stimulate specific emotions

The main goal of this work is to understand how to obtain effective transitions when changing the Web user interfaces from one that stimulates negative affective states to one eliciting more positive emotions. The objective is to improve User eXperience (UX) and usability during the interaction. The transitions applied during the user interface adaptation seek to avoid undesired user disorientation, which can be a consequence of the change. A user study with 40 participants tested three types of transition solutions on a Web application: immediate (changes are applied abruptly all together), overview (changes are first previewed through a small window) and gradual (changes are progressively displayed directly on the interface). The overview and gradual transitions have been designed in such a way as to consider the design criteria used to stimulate specific emotions through the initial and final Web user interfaces. We report and discuss the results of the user test, which, amongst other findings, confirmed that users prefer the overview and gradual transitions.