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Aesthetic Appeal and Visual Usability in Four Icon Design Eras

Published: 07 May 2016 Publication History

Abstract

Technological artefacts express time periods in their visual design. Due time, visual culture changes and thus affects the design of pictorial representations in technological products, such as icons in user interfaces. Previous research of temporal aspects in human-computer interaction has been focusing on particular interaction situations, but not on the effects of design eras on user experience. The influence of icon design styles of different eras on aesthetic and usability experiences was studied with the method of primed product comparisons. Affective preferences and their processing times were analysed in order to examine visual usability in terms of semantic distance and aesthetic appeal of icons from different design eras. Aesthetic and usability preferences of icons from different eras varied, which allowed the investigation of the process in which users experience icons. This examination results in elaborating the process, for example the relationship between cognitive processing fluency, familiarity, and beauty.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '16: Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    May 2016
    6108 pages
    ISBN:9781450333627
    DOI:10.1145/2858036
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 07 May 2016

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    Author Tags

    1. aesthetic appeal
    2. affective reaction times
    3. design eras
    4. icon
    5. semantic distance
    6. visual usability

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