Aesthetics in UX/UI Design

There is something called esthetic usability effect, which means that if something looks good, it's not really perceived by people as being more usable, even if it's not. So those visuals are important and we really, really need to keep that in mind. A lot of the users have now become very tech savvy. A lot of the people, you know, using apps and using websites have been using them for 15 or 20 years now, and they are very skilled.

So they understand the typical patterns. They know that checkout icons should be in the top right corner. They know how a good logging and registration works. So all things like that are kind of predetermined and there's pretty little innovation here. So you can do research to test the viability of the product. There isn't really much way to innovate and user interface. The visuals can be the differentiator. And of course we can use a design system like material design, but that would be

a horrible world to live in because those apps would be all looking boring and soulless and people want that design. That's why people buy Apple products, among other things, because they look good and they are different than everything else, at least sometimes. So people buy with their eyes and we really need to remember that.

So feelings clearly matter in a user interface. That's why we worry about user experience. But depending on the kind of product, the kind of service, the kind of system you're creating, then feelings matter in different ways. So I'm going to distinguish two major ways this can be. So first of all, where emotion is the primary goal of what you're designing.

So eliciting that emotion is the very purpose of the product. So think about art. Think about games, entertainment applications in general. What you're trying to do is create a *sense of emotion* in the person. That's the primary goal. Other things are secondary. Now, in order to satisfy that primary goal, you often need to get *good functionality* and *good usability*.

So when you’re wanting to choose what movie to watch, you want to be able to find, perhaps, the box set that you know is there and the right episode of it as efficiently as possible. So you still have these fundamental usability requirements, even if the primary goal is emotion. But it's often the things that serve that. So think about again, if you're going to share a picture you just taken a picture of, whether it's a meal you're eating

or your cats or whatever else you're wanting to share, the sharing is about the emotional impact that you're wanting to pass on to other people, to your friends, and to your family. However, when you take that photograph, you want a very efficient, slick and easy process to actually get that shared on your social media channels. So, again, although emotion is the primary purpose of what you're doing, you still need the usability and functionality in order to support that process.

Alternatively, emotion might be a secondary goal. So the primary purpose might be something that's more, shall we say, business like. It might be about your work. So like I'm doing now, producing this video, it might be about office work, might be using a spreadsheet, using a database, might be about getting your money from the ATM and get the money out of the hole in the wall.

It might be about paying using your card in a restaurant. But the thing you're trying to do at that point, the primary goal is to get the thing done efficiently and effectively. However, typically, emotions help. They help in the sense that if you're doing, say, a repetitive job, then being alert is important. You know, this is true whether you're a policeman on the beat and watching out, or a soldier in a battlefield situation.

Whether you're driving your car and needing to sort of have a little bit of peripheral awareness. So emotion helps you do that. It helps you keep alert so that you're ready for things. So if you think about online shopping. Some of online shopping is about getting the job done and getting the thing purchased. But there's also an aspect of shopping, this is particularly true of offline shopping. Of when you go into a clothes shop where

the actual process of doing the shopping is part of the joy of the shopping. It's harder to do that online, incidentally. But there are some brands where that is the thing you’re trying to do. You're trying to create a sense of identity in the brand, a sense of joy in exploring it. So within the same kind of application area, online shopping, depending on the brand and depending on the person's need at that moment,

you might want to emphasize one or the other.

The way in which we talk about the psychology of color also fall into the category of human invention, if not fake news. And unfortunately, there is very little research about how the brain actually responds to color. Most color psychology, quote unquote, “facts” are not based in science. And to understand our responses to color, it's crucial

to look at three different ways color affects our psychology. The first is our biological response. And we do know a bit about how we respond biologically, for example, to red objects. They inspire fear and sexual desire in scientific studies that have been done. We also know some things about how we respond biologically to blue light. It can help us with everything from seasonal affective disorder

to issues with our internal clocks to problems with concentration. The second is our cultural response. For example, in the West, blue is by far and away the favorite color and yellow, the least favorite color. But if you move to the East, yellow climbed to the top of the charts. And these differences have to do with different cultural associations with various colors. And the third is our personal association with color.

So if you happen to have gone to prison and were put in a pink cell, you probably have a pretty negative association with pink. But if you had one of your best nights of your life in this beautiful pink restaurant, you probably have a very positive association. So don't be fooled by claims like peach increases the appetite or green calms you or yellow uplifts you.

These might be true for some people whose personal, cultural and biological responses line up to support these claims, but test a different group of people across the globe or even in the same family, and you might find completely different results. It's not to say that color doesn't affect people. It of course, affects people. And often it's the same color can affect people all at once.

For example, if you put a group of people in a fluorescent yellow room with yellow floor walls and ceilings, I'm sure that group of people is going to feel something. But whether everyone in the room feels the same thing for the same reasons is at this point very hard to prove.

As you're designing, it's so easy just to design for the people that you know and for the culture that you know.  However, cultures differ. Now, that's true of many aspects of the interface; no[t] least, though, the visual layout of an interface and the the visual elements. Some aspects are quite easy just to realize like language, others much, much more subtle.

You might have come across, there's two... well, actually there's three terms because some of these are almost the same thing, but two terms are particularly distinguished. One is localization and globalization. And you hear them used almost interchangeably and probably also with slight differences because different authors and people will use them slightly differently. So one thing is localization or internationalization. Although the latter probably only used in that sense. So localization is about taking an interface and making it appropriate

for a particular place. So you might change the interface style slightly. You certainly might change the language for it; whereas global – being globalized – is about saying, "Can I make something that works for everybody everywhere?" The latter sounds almost bound to fail and often does. But obviously, if you're trying to create something that's used across the whole global market, you have to try and do that. And typically you're doing a bit of each in each space.

You're both trying to design as many elements as possible so that they are globally relevant. They mean the same everywhere, or at least are understood everywhere. And some elements where you do localization, you will try and change them to make them more specific for the place. There's usually elements of both. But remembering that distinction, you need to think about both of those. The most obvious thing to think about here is just changing language. I mean, that's a fairly obvious thing and there's lots of tools to make that easy.

So if you have... whether it's menu names or labels, you might find this at the design stage or in the implementation technique, there's ways of creating effectively look-up tables that says this menu item instead of being just a name in the implementation, effectively has an idea or a way of representing it. And that can be looked up so that your menus change, your text changes and everything. Now that sounds like, "Yay, that's it!"

So what it is, is that it's not the end of the story, even for text. That's not the end of the story. Visit Finland sometime. If you've never visited Finland, it's a wonderful place to go. The signs are typically in Finnish and in Swedish. Both languages are used. I think almost equal amounts of people using both languages, their first language, and most will know both. But because of this, if you look at those lines, they're in two languages.

The Finnish line is usually about twice as large as the Swedish piece of text. Because Finnish uses a lot of double letters to represent quite subtle differences in sound. Vowels get lengthened by doubling them. Consonants get separated. So I'll probably pronounce this wrong. But R-I-T-T-A, is not "Rita" which would be R-I-T-A . But "Reet-ta". Actually, I overemphasized that, but "Reetta". There's a bit of a stop.

And I said I won't be doing it right. Talk to a Finnish person, they will help put you right on this. But because of this, the text is twice as long. But of course, suddenly the text isn't going to fit in. So it's going to overlap with icons. It's going to scroll when it shouldn't scroll. So even something like the size of the field becomes something that can change. And then, of course, there's things like left-to-right order. Finnish and Swedish both are left-to-right languages. But if you were going to have, switch something say to an Arabic script from a European script,

then you would end up with things going the other way round. So it's more than just changing the names. You have to think much more deeply than that. But again, it's more than the language. There are all sorts of cultural assumptions that we build into things. The majority of interfaces are built... actually the majority are built not even in just one part of the world, but in one country, you know the dominance... I'm not sure what percentage,

but a vast proportion will be built, not just in the USA, but in the West Coast of the USA. Certainly there is a European/US/American centeredness to the way in which things are designed. It's so easy to design things caught in those cultures without realizing that there are other ways of seeing the world. That changes the assumptions, the sort of values that are built into an interaction.

The meanings of symbols, so ticks and crosses, mostly will get understood and I do continue to use them. However, certainly in the UK, but even not universally across Europe. But in the UK, a tick is a positive symbol, means "this is good". A cross is a "blah, that's bad". However, there are lots of parts of the world where both mean the same. They're both a check. And in fact, weirdly, if I vote in the UK,

I put a cross, not against the candidate I don't want but against the candidate I do want. So even in the UK a cross can mean the same as a tick. You know – and colors, I said I do redundantly code often my crosses with red and my ticks with green because red in my culture is negative; I mean, it's not negative; I like red (inaudible) – but it has that sense of being a red mark is a bad mark.

There are many cultures where red is the positive color. And actually it is a positive color in other ways in Western culture. But particularly that idea of the red cross that you get on your schoolwork; this is not the same everywhere. So, you really have to have quite a subtle understanding of these things. Now, the thing is, you probably won't. And so, this is where if you are taking something into a different culture, you almost certainly will need somebody who quite richly understands that culture.

So you design things so that they are possible for somebody to come in and do those adjustments because you probably may well not be in the position to be able to do that yourself.

There is something called esthetic usability effect, which means that if something looks good, it's not really perceived by people as being more usable, even if it's not. So those visuals are important and we really, really need to keep that in mind. A lot of the users have now become very tech savvy. A lot of the people, you know, using apps and using websites have been using them for 15 or 20 years now, and they are very skilled.

So they understand the typical patterns. They know that checkout icons should be in the top right corner. They know how a good logging and registration works. So all things like that are kind of predetermined and there's pretty little innovation here. So you can do research to test the viability of the product. There isn't really much way to innovate and user interface. The visuals can be the differentiator. And of course we can use a design system like material design, but that would be

a horrible world to live in because those apps would be all looking boring and soulless and people want that design. That's why people buy Apple products, among other things, because they look good and they are different than everything else, at least sometimes. So people buy with their eyes and we really need to remember that.