Attractive things work better

I mentioned a paper in class today written by an Israeli author who believed that earlier findings which pointed to higher usability for aesthetically pleasing interfaces were culturally biased. Here it is:

Tractinsky, Noam, (1997), Aesthetics and Apparent Usability: Empirically Assessing Cultural and Methodological Issues, in Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’97), (pp: 115-122), Atlanta, GA: ACM Press.

Chapter 1 of Donald Norman's Emotional Design book is on the same topic, and available online.

There are more links at the end of the slides from today's lecture.

--Stephen.