Introduction - Modeling Users' Experiences with Interactive Systems - page 5

more to the beauty of the product than to its actual, i.e. inherent, usability. This
finding highlighted the importance of aesthetics in interactive products, an opinion
that found Tractinsky resonant with. Tractinsky, however, predicted that this might
not pertain over different cultures, taking into account that the study of Kurosu and
Kashimura (1995) was conducted within the Japanese culture which is known for
its aesthetic tradition. Tractinsky (1997) replicated the experiment using the same
stimuli, but now in an Israeli context. His initial prediction was not confirmed as
the findings of Kurosu and Kashimura (1995) were reconfirmed in this alternative
setting. One possible criticism of both studies could be that the user judgments were
elicited merely on the basis of the visual appearance of the interface without expe-
riencing the systems. In a subsequent study, Tractinsky et al. (2000) elicited users'
perceptions both before and after interacting with a computer simulation of an inter-
face of an Automatic Teller Machine (ATM). The results suggested that the aesthet-
ics of the interface also impacted the post-use perceptions of usability. Subsequent
work has supported the dominance of beauty in users' preferences (e.g., Schenkman
and Jonsson, 2000; Lindgaard and Dudek, 2003; Lindgaard et al., 2006; Tractinsky
et al., 2006; Hekkert and Leder, 2008) and have provided further insight into users'
inferences between aesthetics and usability (e.g., Hartmann et al., 2008).
Hassenzahl (2004) wanted to further inquire into the nature of beauty in inter-
active products. He developed a theoretical model (Hassenzahl, 2005) that distin-
guishes between objective parameters, product quality perceptions and overall eval-
uations. Based on this model he understood beauty as “a high-level evaluative con-
struct comparable to (but not identical with) other evaluative constructs, such as
goodness or pleasantness” (Hassenzahl, 2004, , p. 323) and perceived usability as
a bundle of lower level judgments reflecting product quality perceptions. He distin-
guished between two quality perceptions: pragmatic and hedonic . Pragmatic quality,
he argued, refers to the product's ability to support the achievement of behavioral
goals (i.e. usefulness and ease-of-use). On the contrary, hedonic quality refers to the
users' self; it relates to stimulation , i.e. the product's ability to stimulate and enable
personal growth, and identification , i.e. the product's ability to address the need of
expressing one's self through objects one owns. He further distinguished between
two overall evaluative judgments: goodness and beauty . Contrary to (Tractinsky
et al., 2000), he found minimal correlation between pragmatic quality, i.e. usabil-
ity, and beauty. Beauty was found to be a rather social aspect, largely affected by
identification; pragmatic quality, on the contrary, related to the overall judgment of
goodness. In a similar vein, Tractinsky and Zmiri (2006) distinguished between sat-
isfying and pleasant experience. They found perceptions of usability to be better
predictors of satisfying rather than pleasant experience while perceptions of prod-
ucts' aesthetics to be better predictors of pleasant rather than satisfying experience.
Hassenzahl's (2004) model of user experience has also been further supported by
subsequent research (e.g.,

Mahlke, 2006; Schrepp et al., 2006; Van Schaik and

Ling, 2008).
Mahlke and Th uring (2007) provided a comprehensive framework linking prod-
uct quality perceptions to emotional reactions and overall evaluative judgments.
Their findings supported Hassenzahl's 2004 distinction between goodness and