Is it beautiful?

This article is from my translation on infoq Chinese siteArticle, Original address is: http://www.infoq.com/cn/news/2012/05/Aesthetics-Usability

Recently, a group of researchers from two European universities pointed out that in software, "Is Beautiful useful?", they come to the conclusion that: "What is useful must be beautiful ".

A paper co-authored by Alexander N. tuch, Sandra P. Roth, Kasper Hornbaek, Klaus opwis, and Javier A. bargas-Avila from the University of Basel, Switzerland and the University of Copenhagen, Denmark is beautiful really usable? Toward understanding the relation between usability, aesthetics, and affect in HCI (PDF) analyzes the relationship between availability and aesthetics, try to find evidence to support the argument that "beautiful is useful.

The author first reviewed some existing studies and pointed out that the results of the previous studies are self-contradictory and there is no clear relationship between aesthetics and availability:

Currently, the relationship between aesthetics and availability is unclear. As far as we know, only five experimental studies can provide reliable information for the relationship between the two. Since the research results are mixed together, it is impossible to give a clear conclusion. A description of this mixed results model is that they adopt different experimental methods and different evaluation criteria for the measurement of dependencies between studies. One of the major challenges of experimental research is the systematic and independent control of aesthetics and availability. This is crucial for drawing conclusions on the relationship between aesthetics and availability. In some studies, aesthetics and availability were mixed. For example, adjusting aesthetic factors by changing or moving some interface elements may accidentally change the availability of the interface (tractinsky et al, 2000 ). Manipulating availability also has a similar impact on aesthetics.

After criticizing previous research results, the author decided to conduct a test to more accurately measure the relationship between aesthetics and availability. They have created four variants for the same online store. In terms of aesthetics, the two are both high and the two are low. In terms of availability, the two are also high and the two are low, create these sites according to the configured rules. The availability of the store has the same appearance as that of the non-availability version, contains the same item entries, and has the same menu width and interval. Only entries/menu labels are different from product categories. 80 participants were invited to evaluate these stores. Then, they performed some operations and finally gave a comment.

The study concluded that aesthetics does not affect the availability of perception, but degraded availability has a negative impact on the aesthetics of perception. In other words, availability is more important than aesthetics. This experiment shows the changes of Classical Aesthetics:

Therefore, the author concluded that "useful things must be beautiful ":

Most existing research can discover (or at least a trend) the impact of interface aesthetics on perceived availability. Two studies (Ben-bassat et al ., 2006 and Lee and koubek, 2010) also found that in addition to the interface aesthetic effect, the impact of interface availability on the perception aesthetics, but this effect is not so obvious. Our research results show that tractinsky's conclusion ("beautiful is useful") needs to be reversed, that is, in some cases, "useful must be beautiful ".

Secondly, the appearance of the interface will change significantly over time: Classic Aesthetics and hqi (Hedonic Quality Identification) will be affected by the availability.

This paper (PDF) discusses in detail the detailed information of the test, the measurement methods of perceived aesthetics and availability, the processing methods of the results, and the method of drawing the conclusions.

View Original English text:Is Beautiful usable, or is it the other way around?