Abstract
To more fully explain the interplay between people's social schemas and humanized interface design, a three step experiment was conducted. 234 high school students were asked to complete three tasks. First, imagine themselves as the “offenders” in 10 face-threatening scenarios and typed messages to their “victims” on a web-based questionnaire. Second, engage in an information scavenger hunt in a website imbedded with several pre-designed error pages, and then evaluated the site. Third, repeat the second task with a different website. Two way ANOVAs were conducted; these featured three levels of orientation in regard to politeness and the effects of three types of error messages on the subjects' ratings of the two websites. Tentative results suggest that perceived quality of human-computer interactions is not related merely to the “activation” of social schema. Rather, a correlation between the nature of the activated schema and the interface design is the key.