Affordance and Affect in Promotional Websites

Abstract

Guidelines for e-commerce website design deal well with the more objective aspects of page design, but have less to say about overall site structure and users' emotional responses. In this study we used a semiotic approach to investigate how several fashion websites provide affordances for navigation and produce affective responses. We gained some interesting insights into how users interpret these websites and, more importantly, we developed a method which could be useful in evaluating website designs.