Overview
Takeaways
- An aesthetically pleasing design creates a positive response in people’s brains and leads them to believe the design actually works better.
- People are more tolerant of minor usability issues when the design of a product or service is aesthetically pleasing.
- Visually pleasing design can mask usability problems and prevent issues from being discovered during usability testing.
Origins
The aesthetic-usability effect was first studied in the field of human–computer interaction in 1995. Researchers Masaaki Kurosu and Kaori Kashimura from the Hitachi Design Center tested 26 variations of an ATM UI, asking the 252 study participants to rate each design on ease of use, as well as aesthetic appeal. They found a stronger correlation between the participants’ ratings of aesthetic appeal and perceived ease of use than the correlation between their ratings of aesthetic appeal and actual ease of use. Kurosu and Kashimura concluded that users are strongly influenced by the aesthetics of any given interface, even when they try to evaluate the underlying functionality of the system.
Further Reading
The Aesthetic Usability Effect and Prioritizing Appearance vs. Functionality
Aesthetic-Usability Effect
Aesthetic Usability Effect
Simple Beauty: The impact of visual complexity, prototypicality and color typicality on aesthetic perception in initial impression of websites.
The Aesthetic-Usability Effect: Why Beautiful-Looking Products are Preferred Over Usable-But-Not-Beautiful Ones
A Neuropsychological Theory of Positive Affect and Its Influence on Cognition
Related
Doherty Threshold
Productivity soars when a computer and its users interact at a pace (<400ms) that ensures that neither has to wait on the other.
Fitts’s Law
The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target.
Hick’s Law
The time it takes to make a decision increases with the number and complexity of choices.