We are emotional creatures. We're not pure brain. Well, pure logic. But emotion drives so much of our lives. This is very clear in the technology world. You sometimes have images of like silicon wafers that really show the raw technology. Or one of those images of the blue light shining
from the super games computer with multiple video cards. But if you think about... one is the game that's going to be played on that computer with the video cards. Or from a technology point of view, think about social networks and the way you feel as you engage in those. Emotion is a crucial part of the way we engage with technology. It's part of being human and because we're human, it's part of our lives with the technology.
Irrespective of whether that is deliberate, it is always going to be there. This has been true since the very beginning of the use of technology. All technology, but particularly computing technology. Within Human-Computer Interaction, you can see the roots of this in the late eighties. And these three key words came out at this point. *Effectiveness*, which is, does something do the job you want it to do?
Does it satisfy the need? *Efficiency* – does it do it well? So is the user able to execute whatever they need to do using as few actions as possible, as easily as possible, as easy to remember is possible? But then there is a third word, *satisfaction*. Do they actually enjoy doing what they're doing? So these have been around since the late eighties. They found their way into ISO standards, that first emerged in the early nineties and are the existing standards today,
although they've been updated over the years. So very, very early on it was recognized that satisfaction was crucial. However, if you look back for probably the first 20 years of usability, it was often ignored, to the extent that often when people quoted these from the ISO standards, they quoted effectiveness and efficiency but forgot satisfaction.
Now, even if you're taking a very hard-edged business view of computer use, you're going to install something that's going to run in a large office or something like that. For pure business value, if your employees are happy, then they're likely to be productive. If your customers are happy, then they're likely to buy your product. Getting the right emotions is critical for business value
as well as for human value and for actually appreciating our users as whole human beings.