The Worst Part of Shopping? A study on how emotional design can affect customers in the checkout experiences of online shopping.

Abstract: Emotions are taking part in our everyday lives even if we are aware of it or not. It helps us behave and to decide when we have to make decisions. A field one does not often associate with emotions is “serious” programmes. We like to think that serious programmes have to remain serious. Because of that, this is also a field where designers not often think about adding emotional design elements. This bachelor project became an explorative project where investigations on emotions in online checkouts, which I chose to define serious programme as, were conducted. The results showed that there are emotions present in the checkout, it could thus be difficult to point them out. Provocative experiments were also made to be able to discover the experienced emotions in the checkout which one does not often think about. It showed that adding emotional design elements in the checkout can influence customers and their behaviour to a certain extent and that there are emotions customers try to avoid.