Marc Hassenzahl

The interplay of beauty, goodness, and usability in interactive products

Two studies considered the interplay between user-perceived usability (i.e., pragmatic attributes), hedonic attributes (e.g., stimulation, identification), goodness (i.e., satisfaction), and beauty of 4 different MP3-player skins. As long as beauty and goodness stress the subjective valuation of a product, both were related to each other. However, the nature of goodness and beauty was found to differ. Goodness depended on both perceived usability and hedonic attributes. Especially after using the skins, perceived usability became a strong determinant of goodness. In contrast, beauty largely depended on identification; a hedonic attribute group, which captures the products ability to communicate important personal values to relevant others. Perceived usability as well as goodness was affected by experience (i.e., actual usability, usability problems), whereas hedonic attributes and beauty remained stable over time. All in all, the nature of beauty is rather self-oriented than goal-oriented, whereas goodness relates to both.

The thing and I: understanding the relationship between user and product

We currently witness a growing interest of the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community in user experience. It has become a catchphrase, calling for a holistic perspective and an enrichment of traditional quality models with non-utilitarian concepts, such as fun, joy, pleasure, hedonic value or ludic value. In the same vein, literature on experiential marketing stresses that a product should not longer be seen as simply delivering a bundle of functional features and benefits—it provides experiences. Customers want products that dazzle their senses, touch their hearts and stimulate their minds. Even though the HCI community seems to embrace the notion that functionality and usability is just not enough, we are far from having a coherent understanding of what user experience actually is.

Understanding, scoping and defining user experience: a survey approach

Despite the growing interest in user experience (UX), it has been hard to gain a common agreement on the nature and scope of UX. In this paper, we report a survey that gathered the views on UX of 275 researchers and practitioners from academia and industry. Most respondents agree that UX is dynamic, context-dependent, and subjective. With respect to the more controversial issues, the authors propose to delineate UX as something individual (instead of social) that emerges from interacting with a product, system, service or an object. The draft ISO definition on UX seems to be in line with the survey findings, although the issues of experiencing anticipated use and the object of UX will require further explication. The outcome of this survey lays ground for understanding, scoping, and defining the concept of user experience.

AttrakDiff: Ein Fragebogen zur Messung wahrgenommener hedonischer und pragmatischer Qualität

Die Evaluation interaktiver Produkte ist eine wichtige Aktivitat im Rahmen benutzerzentrierter Gestaltung. Eine Evaluationstechnik, die sich meist auf die Nutzungsqualitat oder „Gebrauchstauglichkeit“ eines Produkts konzentriert, stellen Fragebogen dar. Zur Zeit werden allerdings weitere, sogenannte „hedonische“ Qualitatsaspekte diskutiert. Diese beruhen auf den menschlichen Bedurfnissen nach Stimulation und Identitat, wahrend bei Gebrauchstauglichkeit (bzw. „pragmatischer Qualitat“) der Bedarf zur kontrollierten Manipulation der Umwelt im Vordergrund steht. In diesem Beitrag wird der „AttrakDiff 2“ Fragebogen vorgestellt, der sowohl wahrgenommene pragmatische als auch hedonische Qualitat zu messen vermag. Ergebnisse zur Reliabilitat und Validitat werden vorgestellt und diskutiert. AttrakDiff 2 stellt einen ersten Beitrag zur Messung von Qualitatsaspekten dar, die uber die reine Gebrauchstauglichkeit hinausgehen.

The Inference of Perceived Usability From Beauty

A review of 15 papers reporting 25 independent correlations of perceived beauty with perceived usability showed a remarkably high variability in the reported coefficients. This may be due to methodological inconsistencies. For example, products are often not selected systematically, and statistical tests are rarely performed to test the generality of findings across products. In addition, studies often restrict themselves to simply reporting correlations without further specification of underlying judgmental processes. The present studys main objective is to re-examine the relation between beauty and usability, that is, the implication that “what is beautiful is usable.” To rectify previous methodological shortcomings, both products and participants were sampled in the same way and the data aggregated both by averaging over participants to assess the covariance across ratings of products and by averaging over products to assess the covariance across participants. In addition, we adopted an inference perspective to qualify underlying processes to examine the possibility that, under the circumstances pertaining in most studies of this kind where participants have limited experience of using a website or product, the relationship between beauty and usability is mediated by goodness. A mediator analysis of the relationship between beauty, the overall evaluation (i.e., “goodness”) and pragmatic quality (as operationalization of usability) suggests that the relationship between beauty and usability has been overplayed as the correlation between pragmatic quality and beauty is wholly mediated by goodness. This pattern of relationships was consistent across four different data sets and different ways of data aggregation. Finally, suggestions are made regarding methodologies that could be used in future studies that build on these results.

Engineering joy

Joy of use has become a buzzword in user interface design although serious attempts at defining it remain sparse. The authors propose systematic methods of taking into account one of its main determinants, hedonic quality, and its complex interplay with usability and utility as a step toward truly engineering the user experience.

Funology: designing enjoyment

Although the general interest of the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research community in pleasure and fun as a goal of software design is growing (see for example [3, 10, 13]) we are far from having a coherent understanding of what enjoyment actually is and how it can be addressed by products and processes (see [7]). We might question whether designing for fun, pleasure and enjoyment is a desirable goal (e.g., [8]) and whether the processes and topics involved differ in any significant way from designing for usability.

To do or not to do: Differences in user experience and retrospective judgments depending on the presence or absence of instrumental goals

Recently, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) started to focus on experiential aspects of product use, such as affect or hedonic qualities. One interesting question concerns the way a particular experience is summarized into a retrospective value judgment about the product. In the present study, we specifically explored the relationship between affect, mental effort and spontaneity experienced while interacting with a storytelling system and retrospective judgments of appeal. In addition, we studied differential effects of the presence or absence of instrumental goals. In general, active instrumental goals did not only impact experience per se by, for example, inducing mental effort, but also the way subsequent retrospective judgments were formed. We discuss the implications of our findings for the practice of product evaluation in HCI specifically, and more general aspects, such as the role of affect in product evaluations and the importance of usage mode compatibility (i.e., a compatibility of the way one ought to and actually does approach a product).

All You Need is Love: Current Strategies of Mediating Intimate Relationships through Technology

A wealth of evidence suggests that love, closeness, and intimacy---in short relatedness---are important for people’s psychological well-being. Nowadays, however, couples are often forced to live apart. Accordingly, there has been a growing and flourishing interest in designing technologies that mediate (and create) a feeling of relatedness when being separated, beyond the explicit verbal communication and simple emoticons available technologies offer. This article provides a review of 143 published artifacts (i.e., design concepts, technologies). Based on this, we present six strategies used by designers/researchers to create a relatedness experience: Awareness, expressivity, physicalness, gift giving, joint action, and memories. We understand those strategies as starting points for the experience-oriented design of technology.

11 – AESTHETICS IN INTERACTIVE PRODUCTS: CORRELATES AND CONSEQUENCES OF BEAUTY

Publisher Summary Aesthetics is viewed as a noninstrumental quality, forming an important aspect of product appeal and experience. However, empirical research addressing questions such as how to measure aesthetics; whether aesthetics can be reliably differentiated from other aspects, such as usability; how important is beauty as a part of experience; what is the value users attach to it; and what are “consequences” of beauty is sparse and results are inconsistent. Inconsistencies in findings can be at least partially resolved by distinguishing three different approaches to the study of beauty: normative, experiential, and judgmental. The normative approach defines particular descriptive attributes of the interactive product as expressing more or less beauty. The experiential approach focuses on all-embracing, holistic aesthetic experiences marked by an altered perception of one’s surroundings or a scene—a heightened sense for objects, persons, the environment, which creates and attaches new, yet unthought meaning to things. Finally, the judgmental approach is concerned with what users judge to be beautiful or not. This approach is foremost interested in the consistency of beauty judgments among individuals and how fast and easy those judgments are. In addition, it addresses the question of how beauty relates to other product attributes, such as novelty or usability. This chapter focuses on the judgmental approach to the study of aesthetics/beauty. It defines beauty in a way that lends itself to its empirical/quantitative study in the context of human-computer interaction. It reviews the research addressing correlates of beauty, primarily focusing on the relation between beauty and usability. In addition, it discusses in detail three consequences of beauty, namely beauty as added value, beauty as a way to accomplish self-referential goals, and, finally, beauty as a way to work better.