ESTÉTICA VISUAL E EXPERIÊNCIA DO USUÁRIO EM INTERFACES HUMANO-COMPUTADOR: UM ESTUDO DE CASO DE SISTEMAS DE GESTÃO DE ATIVIDADES DE ENSINO (SiGAEs)

Abstract

Aesthetics has long awakened discussions about the perception of beauty. This involves both objective and subjective questions. Such uneasiness has arisen from the object of art, but nowadays there is a much wider range of objects that produce feelings of satisfaction in people. In the studies of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), aesthetics is among the different factors that influence satisfaction and, consequently, the users' experience. Such relationships are well understood through subjective evaluations, which provide data on the characteristics and nature of the subjects' aesthetic perceptions. Scientific research in this area chooses different categories of web pages as objects for evaluation. The category of Management of Educational Activities Systems (SiGAEs), is still a category little investigated when it relates aesthetics and user experience. Thus, this research is a case study, which is intended to understand the characteristics and nature of aesthetic perceptions in a SiGAE system, and how they relate to UX. For this, two different profiles of participants were considered: users and non-users of the tool. The research performs an experiment in the form of a visual interaction test. This experiment was organized from a systematic study, which was conducted to locate a specific questionnaire for data collection and to enable the construction of a typology of evaluation. Once structured the experiment, three visual stimuli were extracted from the system pages. Two distinct evaluations followed: (1) collection of aesthetic perceptions through the questionnaire; and (2) collection of verbal reports, with the purpose of obtaining details and elucidating the participants' aesthetic perceptions. In the analysis of the data, the results pointed out negative perceptions in both profiles. However, the users of the tool presented the greatest dissatisfaction with the aesthetics of the system when compared to non-users. Two aesthetic facets of the questionnaire, Simplicity and Diversity, stood out, the first being less critical, and the second more problematic in the perception of both profiles. The Attendance page presented controversy: real users scored the lowest scores while non-users rated this as the least critical page. The difference is accentuated when the perceptions of the veteran are analyzed. Among the conclusions, it was observed that the time of use factor has a negative relation with the analyzed system´s visual aesthetics.