Our paper about the design and validation of the LEMtool (Layered Emotion Measurment tool) has been accepted for publication as a full paper at CHI’13. This was really exciting news, especially considering the notorious difficulty of getting full papers published at CHI. Many thanks to my co-authors, and the CHI reviewers! Here’s the abstract of the paper:

This paper describes the development process and validation of the LEMtool (Layered Emotion Measurement tool). The LEMtool consists of eight images that display a cartoon figure expressing four positive and four negative emotions using facial expressions and body language. The LEMtool can be used during interaction with a visual interface, and allows participants to select elements of the interface that elicit an emotion. The LEMtool images were submitted to a validation study, in which participants rated the recognizability of the images as specific emotions. All images were found to be recognizable above chance level. In another study, the LEMtool was used to assess visual appeal judgements of a number of web pages. The LEMtool ratings were supported by visual appeal ratings of web pages both for 50 milliseconds and free-viewing stimulus exposures. Furthermore, the LEMtool provided insight into the elements of the web pages that elicited the emotional responses.