Yu Centrik

We live in a world where aesthetics do matter. Whether in our social interactions or any other forms of interactions, aesthetics play a significant role in associating the beautiful with the good and the ugly with the bad.
Instead of rejecting the existence of such mentalities, like most usability experts do, we should probably use it in order to make the user’s experience better.
This discussion is an attempt to reveal the social reasons underlying that stereotype. I urge those of you who defend the principle “Physical doesn’t matter” to spare me this speech because those are the first to shed tears on a Beethoven and stare at the magical colors of the horizon. The main focus of this article is to realize why we subconsciously associate the beautiful with the good and the ugly with the bad; and even though a lot of people succeed in controlling such judgments, and before judging decide to see beyond the apparent, if the beautiful turned out to be bad, their judgment of it is less “bad” than if it is ugly and turned out to be “bad”. It is human! It is anchored in our minds. Why? - Check out the following illustrations and you will understand, as you grew up seeing such associations more often than you drank milk!

When Good is associated with Beauty and Evil with Ugliness…

When Bad becomes Good, Ugly becomes Beautiful…

When Good becomes Bad, Beautiful becomes Ugly.

We have been raised to see it this way; even if we control it and try to overcome it, we will still believe that “What is beautiful is good”! We are therefore up to a certain extent, hedonists and beauty definitely affects our judgment.

Many of you at this point are starting to wonder what all this has to do with usability. Well, assuming most people lived up to the stereotype of the Beautiful and Good, aesthetics will determine whether a product will be used in the first place before even talking about its usability. When you first embrace a product, you will immediately know if it is attractive to you or not, and this will define your later interaction with it, and most importantly will affect your later judgments of it including its usability.

Remember the Ford Edsel? – It was a revolutionary car back in the 50’s in terms of quality and functionality, but it was Ugly and in fact it turned out to be the biggest failure in Ford’s history!

The next question that you might want to ask, especially if you read Marcio’s blog, is how ugly products kick in… Oh well, if there is no rival, the need overcomes the beauty!
Loewy stated beautifully that “Between two products equal in price, function and quality, the one with the most attractive exterior will win.” However, when it is an innovation, there are no other competing products in the market, and when those arise the product would have picked up, the users would not easily want to switch and the product remains popular.

My rule of thumb: For the user, Need comes first followed by Aesthetics and Usability.

Can we communicate without words, gestures nor mimics and remotely?
The Parapsychology confirms it, however the objective sciences were less convinced until the 13th of July 2006 when a paralysed man managed, with a sensor
implanted in his brain, to control a computer, a television and a robot with his thoughts!

According to the article published in the New York Times, John P.Donoghue, a Neurology professor at Brown university invented 4-by-4 millimeter sensors containing one hundred tiny electrodes. The device was introduced in the patient`s motor cortex region, responsible of the arm movement, and connected to a pedestal crossing his skull.
The patient, connected to the computer through the pedestal, had to imagine moving his arm to reach certain desired targets. He succeeded in moving a mouse cursor, read his emails, play a video game, draw a circle on the computer screen, move the arm of a robot, change channels and control the volume of a televison set.

Even though many physical constraints limit the operation of the device, this invention integrates the concepts of digitisation and digital transmission of thoughts in the scientific research. We may also see this experiment as a new dimension in Accessibility where the Technology allows to interact with the thoughts regardless of the physical disabilities one can have.

It is therefore time to explore such modes of communication and interaction which will allow these “imprisoned brains” to finally express themselves.

The artwork “Internet Soul Portraits” by Mark Callahan presents an impressive gallery of well-known homepages deprived of their contents (Yahoo, Google, MSN, Amazon, CNN, eBay, The Weather Channel, MapQuest, BestBuy, et MySpace).
Such a work expresses better than a long speech on the importance that a Website interface can have on the company image.

In a previous blog, Chrystel demanded the end of useless interface functions and I thought it would be interesting to follow her lead and identify which of my cellphone’s functions I really used.<br /><br />Here is my technological profile: I work with my laptop computer which is connected to wireless Internet, I listen to the radio and to music on the Internet, I communicate through email, Skype and my cellphone. I use technology for practical reasons and don’t have time to explore hidden functions or those that I can’t understand on the first try. Technology must be useful to me and nothing less will do.<br /><br />My experiment covers a one-year period with a LG5550 cellphone containing 79 functions.<br /><br />The results of this little study are that of the 79 available functions:<br /><ul>   <li>7 are frequently used; </li>   <li>12 are only used once, meaning they’re used at the time of activation;</li>   <li>60 are never used; </li>   <li>18 are useful – the same ones that are used often and to activate the phone, minus the function to download ringtones which I consider more fun than useful ;=) </li> </ul> To summarize this exercise, there’s a lot of noise surrounding my daily tasks, I only use 24% of the available functions and the value added of the remaining 76% is yet to be seen in my everyday use.<br /><br />Along the way, I discovered a few hidden functions like the plane mode (?) and voice recognition which could sometimes be useful (but is only available in English).<br /><br />What would I like to see in the future?<br /><ul>   <li>To be able to download, at my discretion, the functions that are useful to me.</li>   <li>To be able to personalize my user interface (if it’s not already possible with other cellphones) by grouping the frequently used functions under one menu. This would avoid the constant back and forth between different menus when you are looking for a specific function. See attached usability table in <a href=”http://yucentrik.ca/fr/pdf/tableau-fonctionnalites.pdf”>pdf</a> format (sorry available just in French). </li> </ul>