Emotional response to system messages - are they liked?

Design aspects of user interfaces increasingly include emotional and hedonistic facets. With the steadily rising number of computer users with no technical background and no interest and not willing to understand what lies behind that shiny desktop, intuitive controls and information presentations are of growing importance. In this paper we report on the results of a study examining the emotional effect of system messages on users. Different ways to communicate the message were examined: pure text messages, spoken text, and figures, and combination of these with each other and with additional sound. Results show that system messages in general are not liked by users, regardless of their content and modalities used to convey them, and that spoken messages are those perceived as least annoying.