Aesthetic-Usability Effect Pt. 2

I want to use this blog post to dig a little bit deeper into what I think of as the inherent contradiction in talking about aesthetics vs. usability as two separate things and to propose instead that we started thinking about product designs in terms of the effects they produce that can be measured vs. those effects that can't.  Any effect that can be measured can at least be analyzed and its importance prioritized relative to other effects that we may also be seeking to produce.

The second to last sentence in Mark Boulton's article highlights the contradiction:

Good usability is inherent in good design because people think well designed things work better, whether they do or not.

The only way in which this sentence can make sense is in a world in which the concept of "work better" is artificially circumscribed. Mark's intent is to defend good design, of course. I just think he doesn't quite go far enough. He uses the analogy of a car, and I think it's a helpful one. 

Take, for example, a Honda and a BMW. Does the BMW have a "smoother ride"? Probably. Is that an aesthetic issue? I doubt many people would describe it that way but yet what is the practical effect of a smooth ride? Are there any? Are slight vibrations bad for your health or do they adversely affect your ability to navigate the car? No. However, many people would agree that a smooth ride is a good thing. Can you measure smoothness? Yes. 

Actually, you could potentially measure it in two ways:

• You could measure the frequency and magnitude of the vibrations at some particular point in the car, and/or
• You could measure the effect of the vibrations on a driver sitting in the seat via some representation of their emotional response like skin conductance, eye blink rate, pupil dilation, or other sci-fi type methods that are actually in use within many usability labs of large companies 
  
  

The first method of measurement is well known and is assuredly used by car manufacturers and so "smoothness of ride" is probably not considered by anyone in the industry as an aesthetic issue.

How about the way the car looks. Does the BMW look "better" or at least "different"? Yes. Unfortunately, there is only one way to measure the effect of the visual design of the car and this is through the sci-fi methods mentioned above. Does that make it less real? Of course not.

So, a "smooth ride" is a pleasant sensation so is looking at cars that have visual designs that appeal to us.  What's the difference between the two? None. People will pay good money for both sensations.  People will refer a car to their friends based on both sensations. 

So what's the point of talking about aesthetics on the one hand and usability on the other? I don't see it. I think the only reason that the dichotomy exists is that the measurement of emotional response is a recent development and is not widely appreciated.

It seems to me that if all of this is true with cars then it must be especially true with web sites and software since most of our experience with these products is processed visually.

Of course it's possible to create elaborate visual designs that do not elicit a meaningful emotional response.  Don Norman has article (Emotion & Design: Attractive things work better) in which he examines two different tea pots to understand what impact the visual appeal of the tea pot has on its "usability". Personally, the tea pot designs don't do anything for me. I think the more visual processing involved in our natural interaction with a product, the more emotionally powerful good visual design can be.

When visual design is bad enough, of course, we see people do things like squint their eyes and furrow their brow and then people usually feel comfortable using the word "usability" in this case. But this is just a difference in the degree of the problem, not a difference in the fundamental type of problem.