Emotion-concerned human machine Interface Design

Communication between human and the machine/ system through interface is common nowadays with the development of technology. Some theoretical frameworks for designing interfaces for human-machine systems have been developed. Among them, Ecological Interface Design (EID) is a promising one for complex systems. Although EID has won appraise widely, it lacks some basic concerns of the modern society, the concern about real user experience. The commonly seen focus was the cognition of human operators and performance, how the users are feeling or experiencing were almost never referred in related studies. This paper tries to overcome this blank point in corresponding to the call of present era in which the users are put in the centre of design. It starts from a tiny aspect, the color use in ecological interface design, to explore how user emotion studies could give feedback to ecological interface design. Different color schemes of the interface of a prototype system of process control have been tested by psychophysical method to see the influence on users' stress level and performance. This pilot study not only gave feedback to practical design, but also pointed out one direction that EID can be improved further.