Usability and Aesthetics

Thanks for tuning in to this, the first edition of my blog. I hope to make this an interesting and informative experience for us both.

Here's something interesting about usability...for a long time, usability professionals have thought aesthetics to be irrelevant, or even detrimental, to usability. But recent psychological research suggests that this may not be so. Noam Tractinsky, an Israeli academic, replicated a study originally done by a couple of Japanese researchers who found that perceptions of how attractive an ATM layout was (yes, you can have sexy and not-sexy ATM layouts), as well as perceptions of its usability, correlated more strongly with people's performance than actual usability, which did not correlate with performance. Amazing! It suggests that the more attractive something is, the more usable people perceive it to be, AND the more usable it actually is.

This has links with another psychological finding, published back in the 70's, that 'what is beautiful is good'. That is, people that are perceived to be more attractive are also perceived to be better people.

So, maybe it's time to start rethinking the whole aesthetics/usability dichotomy.

If you're interested in this, look at the following article:

Tractinsky, N., Katz, A. S. & Ikar, D. (2000) What is beautiful is usable, Interacting with Computers, 13, 127-145.