Discuss how the concept of affect can be integrated into a usability Essay

Discuss how the concept of affect can be integrated into a usability study - Essay Example isciplinary valuable meta-theory involving interactions involving feeling and cognition which has several useful implications for daily life, contemporary media, marketing, political affairs, psychology and sociology. Hence the concept of affect is a comprehensive psycho-somatic condition analogous to a particular goal-directed example of energy utilization. (Sobiesiak, Jones, and Lewis, 2008, 283) Affect can be small or long-term, weak or strong, sensible or insensible. The word usability was initially used nearly ten years ago in place of the expression â€Å"user friendly â€Å"that had obtained an undesirably indistinguishable and prejudiced implication. Usability is the evaluation of the eminence of an individual’s understanding while working with content or services. Following are the 3 different views explaining how usability can be evaluated: This paper describes a real-life example of integration of concept of affect and usability in new media i.e. autonomic system with strong ease-of-use characteristics. This system, the IBM DB2* Universal Database* (UDB) Version 8.1 autonomic computing system, employs a number of usability features combined with autonomic technologies to deliver an administrative interface unlike anything else in the industry. Autonomic computing is all about self-managing systems. It is amongst the best examples of integration of affect and usability in new media. At the core of the autonomic computing initiative is the concept that computers need to be more self-configuring, self-healing, self-optimizing, and self-protecting in order to reduce the overall complexity of a system. Autonomic computing is described as a "closed loop" system, which includes a "monitor-analyze-plan-and-execute" process in order to make decisions. (Smith, A. 2007, 378) From ease-of-use perspective, autonomic computing offers a leap forward in the following ways: Rarely does an IT component work "out of the box." As part of the installation process, there is