Aesthetic-Usability Effect in UX Design

• The aesthetic/usability effect means people perceive aesthetically pleasing designs as easier to use

Study 1

• Korusu & Kashimura (1995) found a strong positive correlation between perceived aesthetics and usability after participants rated 26 ATM designs

Study 2

• Sonderberger & Sauer (2010) found an attractive phone was rated as more usable compared to an unappealing one, adolescents completed identical tasks faster and with fewer errors on the appealing phone

UX Design Implications

• Users may tolerate usability issues if the design is aesthetically pleasing
• Attractive designs enhance engagement and encourage exploration of functionality

Berlyne's Collative Properties, Inverted-U Relationship

• Explains how hedonic tone (liking) is linked to arousal, low arousal is linked to boredom and sleepiness, high arousal is linked to tense state

Key Variables Affecting Arousal

• Psychophysical Brightness, loudness.
• Ecological: Previous associations and meanings.
• Collative Complexity, novelty, familiarity, surprisingness, uncertainty, interestingness, ambiguity.

Cue Validity vs. Cue Utilization

• Cue Validity: Correlation between environmental cues and an occupant's personality ratings
• Cue Utilization: Correlation between an observer's personality ratings and environmental cues

Gestalt Principles

• Law of Closure: Perception favors whole objects over fragmented parts
• Law of Similarity: Similar items are grouped together
• Law of Proximity: Items close together are perceived as a group
• Law of Good Continuation: Lines expected to continue in the same direction
• Figure-Ground Relationship: Perceiving objects as distinct from their background
• Common Fate: Objects moving in the same direction or speed appear as a unified group

Inattentional Blindness

• Simons & Chabris (1999) study: 46% of participants failed to spot the gorilla in a visual task, failure to notice something visible due to lack of attention

Hick's Law

• Important UI elements (e.g., search icon) may be overlooked if placed in unexpected locations

Hick (1952) Experiment

• Reaction time measured as participants selected buttons corresponding to illuminated lamps, decision time increases with more choices

Hick's Law UX Application

• Present fewer choices at once to reduce cognitive load.
• Guide users by displaying only options.

Fitt's Law

• The difficulty of moving to a target is a function of its size and distance
• UX Application: Increase button sizes to improve usability and group related actions closely to minimize movement distance.

Toma & Hancock (2013) Study

• Undergraduates received either negative or neutral feedback after giving a public speech, those who received negative feedback were more likely to browse their own Facebook profiles afterward, Facebook browsing may be an unconscious strategy to restore self-worth after ego threats.

Human-Centered Design (Yablonski, 2020) Principles

• Designers must consider users' well-being
• Product designs can exploit psychological tendencies (e.g., dopamine-driven reward systems).

Human-Centered Design (Yablonski, 2020) Best Practices

• Understand product impact through user discussions and rely on qualitative insights alongside quantitative data

Brunswik's Lens Model Key Concepts

• Cue Validity: Extent to which observable cues reflect an object's true nature
• Cue Utilization: How effectively individuals rely on valid cues in judgments
• Achievement: Accuracy in assessing the objective environment based on valid cues

Gibson's Affordances

• Direct Perception Theory: Perception doesn't rely solely on memory or past experiences
• Invariant Information: Stable characteristics in the environment provide clear cues for action
• Example: Infants adapt movement strategies based on available affordances (e.g., crawling under obstacles or walking on stable ground).

Peak-End Rule (Kahneman et al., 1993)

• People evaluate past experiences based on the most intense moment (peak) and how the experience ended

Peak-End Rule (Kahneman et al., 1993) Study Example

• Participants preferred enduring longer discomfort (with a slight improvement at the end) rather than a shorter but consistently painful experience

Responsible UX Design

• Technologies like scrolling, notifications, and refresh systems often exploit variable reward schedules, reinforcing compulsive behavior and incorporating self-affirmation strategies can support positive user experiences

Self-Affirmation Theory

• People have an inherent need to perceive themselves as valuable and good and following negative feedback, individuals may seek out activities that restore self-esteem (e.g., browsing social media)

Visual Composition and Image Cropping (McManus et al., 2011) Study

• Participants cropped images (1024 x 768 px) to 512 x 384 px without zooming, using an "inclusion box" and some participants were better at cropping images to create aesthetically pleasing compositions.

• Image cropping requires intentional decisions that align with visual composition principles

Mere Exposure Effect Study (Zajonc & Rajecki, 1969)

• Turkish-sounding words (e.g., kadirga, saricik) were published in a student newspaper with varying frequencies.
• Participants rated frequently seen words more positively, despite not understanding them meaning familiarity bias influencing what people perceive as aesthetically pleasing.

Art Canon Impact

• Impressionist paintings that appeared in more art history books were chosen more frequently and participants preferred paintings they had encountered more often, mere exposure effect may reinforce what's considered "great" art

Ruling Out Rival Hypotheses (Winner, 2019)

• Students knowledgeable in art history showed the same preference for familiar paintings, adults who consciously recognized more paintings still favored familiar ones, children with no exposure to art books showing no preference, suggesting familiarity drives preference rather than inherent quality

Why Do We Like Familiar Things?

• Evolutionary Explanation: Evolution favors caution toward novel stimuli (potential threats), repeated exposure signals safety, promoting positive feelings
• Cognitive Explanation: Familiar things are easier to process (fluency), creating positive feelings, this "ease of processing” is often misattributed to the object itself

Chandelier in Visual Art

• Van Eyck's Arnolfini Wedding (1434) Depicts a detailed chandelier with complex light and shadow patterns
• Documentary: Hockney's Secret Knowledge: Suggests Renaissance artists used camera obscura to trace room details and improve realism

Effort Heuristic (Cho & Schwartz, 2008)

• Participants reading a fake article emphasizing either hard work or talent, rated a painting's value higher if told it took one year versus three days, perceived effort influencing perceived artistic value

Mental Representation of Space

• Tolman's Cognitive Map Theory: Rats demonstrated a mental map of a maze adapting to using their internal map and people develop internal spatial maps to navigate environments
• Place Cells (Hippocampus): Certain hippocampus cells fire when rats return to specific locations

Lynch's (1960) Sketch Maps

• Participants asked to draw maps of their cities and identified five common elements in mental mapping:

1. Paths: Roads, walkways, and routes people follow.
2. Edges: Boundaries that limit or enclose spaces.
3. Districts: Larger zones with distinct character.
4. Landmarks: Easily recognizable points of reference.
5. Nodes: Key points where people gather or decisions are made

Appleyard's Spatial Maps

• Allocentric Reference: People view maps from a "birds-eye" perspective rather than positioning themselves within the space

Cultural Differences

• Dutch speakers use egocentric language (e.g., left, right)
• Tzeltal speakers use allocentric language (e.g., north, south)

Brown & Levinson (1993) Study

• Dutch and Tzeltal speakers repositioned objects after a 180-degree rotation, Dutch speakers using egocentric positioning (relative to themselves), Tzeltal speakers using allocentric positioning (relative to cardinal directions)

Two Types of Spatial Memory

• Categorical (Left Hemisphere): Focuses on relative positioning (e.g., on/off, left/right).
• Coordinate (Right Hemisphere): Focuses on precise measurements and distances

Reaction Time Experiment

• Left hemisphere processed categorical details faster and the Right hemisphere excelling in precise spatial positioning

Perceived Distance Bias (Tversky, 2005)

• People perceive the distance from a non-landmark to a landmark as shorter than the reverse and the alignment bias means people remember two objects as more aligned than they actually are

Children's Spatial Development Piaget & Inhelder

• 5-year-olds struggle to represent objects from other perspectives
• 7-year-olds can understand that hidden features exist (e.g., "the other eye is on the other side")
• Three Mountains Task: Demonstrates children's developing ability to visualize alternate perspectives

Hermer & Spelke (1994) Study

• Toddlers (18-24 months) used room geometry (e.g., long vs short walls) for orientation and they struggled to combine geometry with visual cues (e.g., a blue wall)

Hippocampus and Spatial Memory

• Critical for allocentric navigation and spatial memory.
• Video Game Impact on Spatial Ability Feng et al (2007)

Video Game Impact on Spatial Ability Feng et al (2007)

• Mental rotation task (MRT) improved after 10 hours of action-game practice, improvement especially strong for females

Age-Related Differences in Spatial Memory (Ruggiero et al., 2016)

• Older participants showed slower reaction times in allocentric tasks and egocentric skills remained stronger with age

Wayfinding (Carlson et al., 2010)

• Visual access between key points
• Clear differentiation between spaces
• Spatial layout complexity

Alignment Study (Werner & Schindler, 2004)

• Navigation accuracy improved when the elevator axis aligned with room axes
• Segmentation Bias in Wayfinding (Kopec, 2012)
• People naturally break long distances into smaller segments
• Design strategies to support segmentation: Vary ceiling heights and use color changes or patterns to define key areas

Intelligibility in Building Design (Haq & Zimring, 2003)

• Intelligibility Scores: Measure how easy a building is to navigate.
• Higher scores = easier navigation.
• "City Hospital" (Score: 0.56) had few clear paths compared to "University Hospital" (Score: 0.83) with clear central pathways and improved navigation success

Principles of You-Are-Here Maps (Levine et al., 1984)

1. Structure Matching: Ensure landmarks on the map correspond to real-world locations.
2. Forward-Up Equivalence: Align the map's orientation with the direction the user faces.

Color Preferences

• Most preferred: Blue
• Most disliked: Dark Yellow
• General Preference: Saturated colors over muted colors

WAVE Measure (Extent of Object Association)

• Assesses how much people like objects related to different colors by participants never directly asked about color preference and suggests that color preferences can be indirectly assessed based on the positive or negative associations of objects

Correlation vs. Causation in Color Preference and Experimental Evidence on Color Preferences

• Identical graft studies show that correlation is not causation Strauss et al (2013): manipulates color associations showing color preferences changed after exposure, demonstrating a causal relationship between object associations and color preferences

Ecological Valence Theory (EVT)

• People like/dislike colors depending on their experiences with objects of that color (Example: blue is widely liked and dark yellow is strongly disliked)
• Cross-Cultural Variation: In China, red is associated with good luck because it is associated with food leading to a stronger preference for red; Taylor et al (2013) found rural Nigerian participants had very different color preferences compared to Western participants

Fractal Dimension & Aesthetic Preference

• Taylor et al (2011): measured fractal complexity in Jackson Pollock's paintings over time finding people prefer medium fractal dimension (D) supporting Berlyne's hypothesis that people like a balance between simplicity and complexity. People also prefer computer-generated images with medium complexity

McManus et al. (2011) – Meaning vs. Structure

• Tested whether aesthetic preference is driven by structure, balance of light, shade, and form, and meaning ensuring objects in the artwork look "good." Meaning played a stronger role than structure but structure still mattered

Oblique Effect

• People process horizontal and vertical lines more fluently than oblique (angled) lines with Latto et al (2000) showing participants Mondrian paintings only using horizontal and vertical lines because they preferred these over compositions with diagonal lines

Sharp vs. Curved Contours

• Carbon (2010) found that people rated older, curvier car designs higher in aesthetic appeal and Bar & Neta (2007) founded that sharp edges are perceived as a threat, leading to a preference for curves by studying responses to curved vs sharp objects using fMRI

Cognitive Processing of Space & Direction

• Routes & Navigation with Appleyard's "Sequential Maps" meaning people tend to imagine routes from an egocentric perspective

Shelton & McNamara (1997) Study

• Participants studied a room layout from two positions and were later asked to point to objects from memory which shows that pointing was more accurate when recalling from the original viewpoint thus suggests people encode spatial memory egocentrically

Mental Scanning Kosslyn et al

• People take longer to mentally scan between distant landmarks on a map and the implication is the brain simulates spatial distance when recalling layouts
• Measuring Aesthetic Sensitivity & ""Good Taste,"" Universalist vs Contextualist Approaches

Universalist Approach

• Assumes beauty is inherent and independent of culture as some people are more sensitive to objectively beautiful features

Contextualist

• Believes context influences aesthetic judgments with people rating paintings differently when told they were made by AI vs humans

Visual Aesthetic Sensitivity Test (VAST) – Eysenck (1983)

• Participants compared 42 image pairs with subtle aesthetic errors across English and Japanese participants, there was good agreement between cultures, suggesting some universal aesthetic sensitivity which supports the idea that certain visual preferences are innate rather than entirely cultural

Key Findings

• Color Preferences: Blue is most preferred whereas yellow is most disliked and preferences are influenced by object associations (Ecological Valence Theory) with Strauss et al (2013) showing causal links between object associations and color preference; Aesthetic Judgment & Composition: People prefer medium complexity (D) in fractal dimension studies (Taylor et al, 2011) and find curved objects are more aesthetically pleasing than sharp ones (Bar & Neta, 2007)
• Oblique effect: People process horizontal and vertical structures more easily
• Cognitive Mapping & Navigation: People recall spaces using egocentric frames of reference (Shelton & McNamara, 1997) and that mental scanning is slower for larger distances (Kosslyn et al)
• Aesthetic Sensitivity: Some aesthetic preferences appear universal (VAST study) and that Universalist vs Contextualist approaches debate whether beauty is objective or influenced by context