On the significance of "beauty" to user experience

Beauty (aesthetics) is a concept that is very rich in meaning. There are different definitions of different areas in different periods, and there is no consensus at present. For example, in the Renaissance, people advocated the objective measurement of aesthetic characteristics, with the nature of the object (such as orderly, symmetrical) to explain the beauty. And modern aesthetics tends to start from people's psychological experience, the beauty and happy things (including feeling, imagination, etc.) linked, and not just appreciate things themselves. In this sense, a good work of art does not necessarily give a person a sense of pleasure. So what is beauty for interactive products? The "beauty" of many researchers ' interactive products is mainly reflected in the pleasant user experience, and the user's judgment of product aesthetics may emphasize the sensation of stimulation (such as visual, auditory, tactile, mainly visual) nature. It is also said that beauty is mainly manifested in the attractiveness of the physical appearance of the product.

Tractinsky (1997) The experimental results of ATM interface show that usability evaluation is highly correlated with aesthetic evaluation. Thus, the field of human-computer interaction began to explore the aesthetic degree, for example, to explore the relationship between beauty and usability, the author puts forward "better use of beauty" and the quantification method of aesthetic degree, which is developed from a single "very beautiful-very beautiful" dimension to multidimensional measurements, such as visual clarity and richness. Aesthetics is also incorporated into the user experience category. In the user experience process model (see figure, michael,2006), the user experience component is divided into two categories: Instrumental attribute and non instrumental attribute. The tool attribute is the product attribute which is related to the function realization, the efficiency, the opposite is not the tool attribute, the esthetic degree belongs to the non tool type attribute. The user's perception of two kinds of product attributes and the emotion reaction caused by the product produce the overall evaluation of the product.

(Michael minge, 2006, user experience process model)

The user's perception of beauty is based on the overall visual impression of the product. Unlike usability, the aesthetic characteristics of the product are explicit, more easily observed, the user in a very short period of time can form the evaluation of product beauty. Usability is the intrinsic attribute of the product, the user needs the actual experience in order to evaluate the usability of the product better.

A large number of studies have found that the aesthetic degree of products has an important contribution to the overall satisfaction of users. Compared with the products that are easy to use but not very beautiful, people are more satisfied with the beautiful but less useful products. such as Cyr (2006) on a mobile phone website of the "city Guide" to carry out experiments. Experiment set up a situational task "Imagine you just arrived in San Francisco and your friend suggested that you choose a restaurant on your phone and tell him the address of the restaurant." Allow users to freely browse the Web page without any time limit. After the task is completed, the user is asked to evaluate the website from five dimensions of aesthetics, usability, usability, pleasure and loyalty, and interview the users. By using the method of structural equation model to analyze the results of user evaluation, the results show that aesthetics is mediated by subjective usability, ease of use and pleasant feeling, which affects users ' loyalty to mobile Web pages.

In summary, we in the overall grasp of product user experience, the interface aesthetics into consideration. The use of aesthetics to make up for the shortage of products, improve the overall user experience level of the product.

Article Source: Sina ued