What is Aesthetic-Usability Effect?
Basically this law of UX can be defined as this: an aesthetically pleasing design will be more positively received by users and lead them to believe it is more usable – even if the design isn’t very usable.
The reason this is the case is because human beings like pretty things. It is in our nature to want things that look good on the page or screen (even if they aren’t as effective to use) – and this is true across all people. So when you design a nice looking app or website, people will assume it works better than a plain text interface – even if the text interface works perfectly.
Why does this matter? Because by creating an aesthetically pleasing design, users will be more forgiving or tolerant of minor usability issues. In fact, they might not even discover these usability issues in the first place during user-testing. As designers, we can use aesthetic-usability to our advantage. We should pay even more attention to the visual UI of our designs in order to create a more usable and positive user experience, and a good first impression.
But on the other hand, it’s important not to ignore larger usability problems within our designs. Users can only tolerate so many missing buttons before they get frustrated and leave your app or site. Which means that, to create better designs, we need to find that perfect balance between aesthetics and usability.
This is important to know when working on my own future projects, so that I can try to create designs that are both aesthetically pleasing and usable.