While typing on this MacBook that I was kindly gifted for my birthday, I tend to overlook the subtle design features that Apple has spent billions of dollars trying to perfect – mostly due to the fact that, because of heavy procrastination, I don’t have time to do anything at all. But everything form the size of the screen to the spacing of the keys is taken into account when designing this best selling laptop. These days it is all about the user and what they demand and has become somewhat expected of any designer to take the user into account (Boulton, 2005). This is called the Aesthetic Usability Effect.
This is the relation between how good a design looks and how the user will react to it and consume the product – weather it be a car or a t-shirt. However, this is not a guarantee that the product or item will be a huge success, much like almost all Apple products. The item also has to be useable to the user as well as look nice. In a study published in Computers in Human Behaviour it was found that the aesthetic appeal did not affect the perceived usability of the item, however, once the users started using the product, the aesthetic appeal went down due to the low usability of the product (Tuch, Roth, Hornbæk, Opwis, & Bargas-Avila, 2012).
So, in short, the prettier the item does mean that people will want to use it, but this is not a “sure fire” way of producing a great product. It has to be usable and aesthetically pleasing for it to be on the level of the Apple MacBook that I’m typing on today.
Works Cited
Boulton, M. (2005, March 6). Aesthetic-Usability Effect. Retrieved Oct 30, 2013, from The Personal Disquiet of Mark Boulton: http://www.markboulton.co.uk/journal/aesthetic-usability-effect
Tuch, A. N., Roth, S. P., Hornbæk, K., Opwis, K., & Bargas-Avila, J. A. (2012). Is beautiful really usable? Toward understanding the relation between usability, aesthetics, and affect in HCI. Computers in human behavior , 28 (5), 1596-1607.
Names are Strange 