the Association for Computing Machinery (CACM), Forthcoming

Affect (mood, emotion, feelings) is a fundamental aspect of human beings and is found to influence reflex, perception, cognition, and behavior [6,7]. Studies in organizational behavior, marketing, and management have confirmed the strong impact of affect on job satisfaction, decision-making behavior, and consumer shopping behavior. Affective quality is the ability of an object or stimulus to cause changes in one’s affect. Limited empirical data in Human-Computer Interaction research suggest that perceived affective or hedonic quality of an interface has a positive impact on users ’ perceived usability of the system [9-11]. It is discovered that pleasing things work better, are more regularly used, are easier to learn, influence future purchase choices, and produce a more harmonious result; thus affect and emotion have an important place in design; usability and aesthetics are both instrumental in creating pleasurable electronic products [6]. Empirical evidence is scarce on whether perceived affective quality of a system would influence perceived usefulness, which is the degree to which a person believes that using a particular system would enhance his or her job performance [1]. This evidence can be extremely important for a better understanding of the causal sources of user’s IT related behavior. Abundant empirical studies in user technology acceptance literature show that perceived usefulness is a stronger an