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the factors in a complex decision with pure objectivity. A similar argument is advanced by
Helander (2003), who found that people judge the comfort of chairs more by the chairs' aesthet-
ics than by their ergonomics. Consequently, the product's aesthetics can act as a factor enhancing
the desirability of that product. From a designer viewpoint, an aesthetic approach can also reveal
solutions to hidden problems, because visual thinking leads to clarification of forms and to their
organization into integrated patterns (Ashford, 1969). The contrary viewpoint saw aesthetics as
irrelevant (or even detrimental) to the achievement of users' goals and as a gratuity that deflected
the design effort from issues of substance to issues of style. Norman (1988) argued that the pen-
dulum may have swung too much in favor of putting aesthetics ahead of usability. Recently, how-
ever, it has been claimed that modern design places too much emphasis on performance issues and
not enough on aspects, such as aesthetics, that promote pleasure (e.g., Blythe et al., 2003; Green
and Jordan, 2002; Norman, 2004a).
Few doubt that the aesthetic criterion is inseparable from effective design of interactive IT (Alben,
1996). The importance of beauty, or aesthetics—terms that are used interchangeably in this
work—has been recognized since antiquity. In some ancient traditions, beauty, and the perception
of beauty, were of cosmic importance (Feagin and Maynard, 1997). Following Vitruvius, Alberti
defined beauty as the wholeness of a body, “a great and holy matter” (Johnson, 1994, p. 402).
Modern social science has established the importance of aesthetics in everyday life. In a seminal
paper, Dion, Berscheid, and Walster (1972) demonstrated that a person's physical appearance
influences other aspects of the social interaction. A meta-analytical study found that “attractive-
ness is an advantage in a variety of important real-life situations” (Langlois et al., 2000, p. 399).
We are affected not only by the beauty of other people but also by the aesthetics of nature and of
architecture (e.g., Nasar, 1988; Porteous, 1996), and of artifacts (Postrel, 2002; Coates, 2003;
Norman, 2004a). Aesthetics plays an important role in new product development, marketing strate-
gies, and the retail environment (Kotler and Rath, 1984; Russell and Pratt, 1980; Whitney, 1988).
Bloch (1995) concluded that the “physical form or design of a product is an unquestioned deter-
minant of its marketplace success” (p. 16).
Interest in visual aesthetics (as distinguished from abstract elegance) is growing in the com-
puting community as well. For example, the Aesthetic Computing community (Fishwick, 2002,
2003) is targeting the application of art theory and practice to computing, in an attempt to aug-
ment existing representations and notions of aesthetics in computing.
The robust findings regarding the ubiquitous importance of aesthetics make its absence from
the agenda of the IT disciplines even more puzzling. Lately, evidence in support of its role in HCI
has started to emerge. This evidence encompasses both hardware and software issues. For exam-
ple, Apple's iMac was heralded as the “aesthetic revolution in computing,” and an indication that
the visual appearance of IT had become a major factor in buyers' purchasing decisions (Postrel,
2002). Recent empirical studies indicate that aesthetic design enhances perceptions of and atti-
tudes toward various computing products, specifically in the context of the Web (Schenkman and
Jonsson, 2000; Kim et al., 2002; van der Heijden, 2003). Other studies have found aesthetics to
be of importance, though not in a dominant way, in affecting users' perceptions (Zhang and von
Dran, 2000; Tarasewich et al., 2001). Although they did not measure aesthetics directly, some
studies indicate that Web site design is a major determinant of perceived credibility and trustwor-
thiness of e-commerce sites (Fogg et al., 2002; McKnight et al., 2002). Research suggests that
aesthetics is an important determinant of the pleasure experienced by the user during the interac-
tion (Jordan, 1998). It was found to be highly correlated with perceptions of systems' usability
both before (Tractinsky, 1997) and after (Tractinsky et al., 2000) the interaction, and with user sat-
isfaction (Lindgaard and Dudek, 2003).
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