Publications
WORLD USABILITY DAY 2007
Poor usability causes stress - 12/11/2007
This video was created for World Usability Day 2007, for which the theme was “Healthcare”, and aims to demonstrate how a web site that is hard to use can cause stress.
We invited a Brazilian citizen who needed to renew her passport, to participate in a usability test. We asked her to go onto the federal police’s web site to fill in the necessary forms and book an appointment to pick up her passport. While she carried out these activities we monitored her heart rate.
We found that various times the participant encountered difficulties on the web site her heart rate accelerated. Her heart rate increased while she filled in the online form, because it was not clear what she had to do. It also went up a lot while she was trying to book an appointment to pick up her passport.
You can watch the participant and see her heart beat rising in the video below. (Note- the video is in Portuguese and has explanations about what is happening in English.)
User’s heart rate increases during her attempt at renewing her passport online.