Unveiling Usability and UX Relationships for Different Gender, Users Habits and Contexts of Use

Abstract

Despite the abundance of research into usability and user experience (UX), there are few works approaching how the context influences the relationships between these two concepts. The actual experience of a user highly depends on personal characteristics, like the social and cultural background. In this work, we address user-related and contextual factors for a better comprehension of usability UX correlations. We conducted a study with 160 participants in entertainment, e-bank, education and e-commerce websites. As a result, for both sex and usage time user classes, a good usability was positively correlated to positive emotions. Despite the correlations between usability and female users negative and positive emotional reactions are greater than for male users, no significant difference was observed. Also, there was no significant difference involving correlations between usability and emotional reactions, when comparing less and more frequent users. As another result, there are differences of the degree of the correlations between perceived usability and emotional responses in different contexts of use, when dividing the users on sex and usage time classes, but the correlations between usability and positive emotions remained positive. In spite of the particularities of user classes, similarities on the usability for different user classes and the agreement of patterns of correlations with previous literature, our results reinforces the usability as a determinant aspect for UX.