Joan Vinall-Cox's Library tagged userinterface → View Popular

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24 Jun 09

alistapart.com by Mobify

Excellent explanation of why aesthetics in web design is part of readability. Matches my experience and observations.

m.alistapart.com/...visual-decision-making - Preview

webdesign usability userinterface aesthetics academic

04 May 09

A List Apart: Articles: In Defense of Eye Candy

A truly valuable and important article about learning

www.alistapart.com/...indefenseofeyecandy - Preview

learning design usability reading aesthetics webDesign userinterface

the powerful role aesthetics play in shaping how we come to know, feel, and respond.
Our language constrains visual design to mere styling and separates aesthetics and usability, as if they are distinct considerations
14 more annotations...
- “the science of how things are known via the senses,”
- how we perceive and interpret the world
- how people respond to these elements. Our question becomes: how do aesthetic design choices influence understanding and emotions, and how do understanding and emotions influence behavior
- Cognitive science studies how people know things and aesthetics plays a critical role in cognitive processing
- When designing, we must consider how our brain interprets the meaning of color, shadow, and shading. We rarely notice these aesthetic choices, except when people get them wrong:
- how our brain interprets the meaning of things such as color, shadow, shading, and other natural occurrences.
- the more attractive button is likely to be more usable by most people
- “...emotion is not a luxury: it is an expression of basic mechanisms of life regulation developed in evolution, and is indispensable for survival. It plays a critical role in virtually all aspects of learning, reasoning, and creativity. Somewhat surprisingly, it may play a role in the construction of consciousness.” [1]
- According to a 2002 study, the “appeal of the overall visual design of a site, including layout, typography, font size, and color schemes,” is the number one factor we use to evaluate a website’s credibility.
- Attention to design details implies that the same care and attention has been spent on the other (less visible) parts of the product—which implies that this is a trustworthy product.
- The only difference was that one machine’s buttons and screens were arranged more attractively than the other. In both Japan and Israel (where this study was repeated) researchers observed that subjects encountered fewer difficulties with the more attractive machine. The attractive machine actually worked better.
- we can’t actually separate cognition from affect.
- Separate studies in economics and in neuroscience are proving that:
  
  “affect, which is inexplicably linked to attitudes, expectations and motivations, plays a significant role in the cognition of product interaction…the perception that affect and cognition are independent, separate information processing systems is flawed.”
- We’re not nearly as in charge of our decisions as we’d like to believe.