Aesthetic-Usability Effect

Blog

Aesthetic-Usability Effect

Written by Gui.do X Jansen,
August 2010
Written by a human, not by AI

Theory:

From the article Attractive  Things Work Better from DA Norman: Positive affect makes people more tolerant of minor difficulties and  more flexible and creative in finding solutions. Products designed for  more relaxed, pleasant occasions can enhance their usability through  pleasant, aesthetic design. Aesthetics matter: attractive things work  better.

In short: We have the tendency to place value on products/ services/  persons  based on a very limited  piece of data and we value things  more when  they cost more.

Application:

How attractive are your products? How good-looking is your website to your users? Attractive doesn't have to mean you have to spend thousands of dollars on a design agency. But you can't get away with throwing together some lines, forms and colors. If you're not a designer, get help of someone who is and make your shop look like it's very user friendly. The funny part? It'll actually become more user friendly. 

More like this? Follow me on LinkedIn!

Most of my content is published on LinkedIn, so make sure to follow me there!

Follow me on

Recent posts

Often Confused Commerce Terms
 Often Confused Commerce Terms

Recently I've seen some (often absolute) statements going around, generally in the line of "open source commerce platforms are a terrible idea". Now of course different solutions always have different pros and cons.

Optimization hierarchy of evidence
Optimization hierarchy of evidence

A hierarchy of evidence (or levels of evidence) is a heuristic used to rank the relative strength of results obtained from scientific research. I've created a version of this chart/pyramid applied to CRO which you can see below. It contains the options we have as optimizers and tools and methods we often use to gather data.