The relationship between design factors and affective response in personalized blog interfaces

The blog has become one of the most important virtual spaces where people express their uniqueness and define themselves in social groups. Bloggers place great emphasis on the visual interface of blogs, and both usability and affective factors are important considerations for a successful blog. This study aims to determine major dimensions influencing user affective responses to personalized blog interfaces, and the corresponding design factors that bloggers or platform developers may apply to effectively manipulate them. This study used the Affective/Kansei Engineering approach and two multidimensional scaling algorithms to evaluate the affective responses of users. In conclusion, this study first defined the three dimensions of an affective perceptual space, and their corresponding design factors and affective responses. Secondly, it investigated the relationship between the visual features of 18 typical blogs and the 12 typical affective response vectors in this space. This study also discussed blog interface design guidelines for bloggers and developers. These findings highlight the application potential for developing customized blog template or automated database template generation systems.