Fostering self-efficacy through usability and emotional product design? An explorative study

Raising the user’s self-confidence is a promising strategy to reduce product-related user stigma. In the context of product usage, the commonly used term self-confidence refers to the psychological construct of self-efficacy. To strengthen a user’s self-efficacy through product design, providing both good usability and emotionality in a product seems to be a reasonable starting point. However, their suitability and validity for this purpose has not yet been sufficiently assessed. This paper examines whether self-efficacy would be associated with perceptions of a product’s usability and emotionality. By conducting an online survey (n = 105; stigma-sensitive product demonstrator: walker), it was confirmed that the perception of good usability and emotionality of walkers were positively associated with the user’s perceived self-efficacy. Moreover, a negative interaction effect was identified showing that the association between emotionality and self-efficacy increased with lower levels of perceived usability and vice versa. This may indicate that emotions can compensate the importance of usability at least to some extent.