A study of how emotional design of a digital task management tool impacts individual productivity

Abstract

Emotions play a critical role in perception and decision making. The use of emotional design in multimedia learning tools has been previously studied and it has been shown that positive emotions facilitate learning by reducing task difficulty and increasing motivation. This study aims to apply emotional design to task-management environments and study its effect on task productivity. A digital task management tool with five environments - one control, and four emotional - was created and tested by 41 users. For the emotional environments, Calm, Motivational, Sad, and Stressful were chosen from each quadrant of the two-axis valence and activation characterization of emotions. In each environment, users completed 3 tasks, which asked the users to watch a short educational video and answer a quiz based on the video. Affectiva, a facial emotion detection tool, was used in conjunction with PANAVA-KS, a method of measuring self-reported emotions, to determine users' emotional states while completing the tasks. Quiz completion times were analyzed in relation to these emotional states to determine whether or not emotional environments improved task completion. It was found that completion times did not improve significantly on average in comparison to a standard task management environment. However, a significant increase in completion time was seen in the Calm environment, suggesting a possible correlation between low positive activation and low task productivity.