Abstract
Visual Aesthetics has gathered interest among scholars in HCI research. The growing interest stems from examinations of the aesthetic-usability effect (“what is beautiful is usable”), and possibly vice versa. Thus, numerous studies focus on understanding how we make sense and experience visual entities in interacting with technology. However, theoretical, and methodological stances vary, which impact conclusions of the studies conducted, and thus, affect design implications. Visual experience research in HCI lacks detailed conceptualizations of the constituents of visual experience and understanding of how these conceptualizations affect the overall research results through implicit methodological stances taken. In this paper, an overview of methodological stances to visual aesthetics in HCI research is presented and an interactionist approach is discussed which combines objectivist and subjectivist methodological stances and enriches our understanding of current research of visual aesthetics in HCI. In addition, methodological grounds of interactionism are described and extended from cognitive processing fluency paradigm to take into account the overall complexity of visual experience. Moreover, conceptualization of visual experience from cognitive-affective perspective in line with interactionism is discussed, following with metodical considerations of interactionism, and issues related to the role of visual stimuli in examining visual aesthetics in HCI.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Altaboli, A., Lin, Y.: Investigating effects of screen layout elements on interface and screen design aesthetics. In: Advances in Human-Computer Interaction, no. 5 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1155/2011/659758
Arnheim, R.: Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye. University of California Press, Berkeley (1974)
Bargas-Avila, J.A., Hornbæk, K.: Old wine in new bottles or novel challenges: a critical analysis of empirical studies of user experience. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 2689–2698. ACM, New York (2011). https://doi.org/10.1145/1978942.1979336
Bauerly, M., Liu, Y.: Computational modeling and experimental investigation of effects of compositional elements on interface and design aesthetics. Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud. 64(8), 670–682 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1155/2011/659758
Bell, C.: Art. Capricorn Books, New York (1958)
Berlyne, D.: Aesthetics and Psychobiology. Appleton-Century-Crofts, New York (1971)
Berlyne, D.: Studies in the New Experimental Aesthetics: Steps Toward an Objective Psychology of Aesthetic Appreciation. Hemisphere, London (1974)
Carroll, N.: Beyond Aesthetics Philosophical essays. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2001)
Crilly, N., Moultrie, J., Clarkson, P.J.: Seeing things: consumer response to the visual domain in product design. Des. Stud. 25(6), 547–577 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.destud.2004.03.001
Csikszentmihalyi, M.: Design and order in everyday life. Des. Issues 8(1), 26–34 (1991). https://doi.org/10.2307/1511451
Desmet, P., Hekkert, P.: Framework of product experience. Int. J. Des. 1(1), 57–66 (2007)
Evans, P., Thomas, M.: Exploring the Elements of Design. Cengage Learning, Boston (2012)
Ericsson, A.K., Simon, H.A.: Protocol Analysis: Verbal Reports as Data. MIT Press, Cambridge (1984)
Fodor, J.: Fodor’s guide to mental representation. Mind 94(373), 76–100 (1985)
Fodor, J.: Précis of the modularity of mind. Behav. Brain Sci. 8(01), 1–5 (1985)
Folkmann, M.N.: The Aesthetics of Imagination in Design. MIT Press, Cambridge (2013)
Forsey, J.: The Aesthetics of Design. Oxford University Press, Oxford (2016)
Frankish, K., Ramsey, W.M.: The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Science. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2012)
Galitz, W.: The Essential Guide to User Interface Design: An Introduction to GUI Design Principles and Techniques. Wiley, Hoboken (2007)
Gibson, J.: The Ecological Approach to Human Perception. Houghton Mifflin, Boston (1979)
Gombrich, E.: The Story of Art. Phaidon, London (1995)
Heidegger, M.: Being and time. English translation by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (1962). Basil Blackwell, Oxford (1927)
Hekkert, P.: Design aesthetics: principles of pleasure in design. Psychol. Sci. 48(2), 157–172 (2006)
Hekkert, P., Leder, H.: Product aesthetics. In: Editor Schifferstein, H., Editor Hekkert, P. (eds.) Product Experience, pp. 259–286. Elsevier, Amsterdam (2008)
Hekkert, P., Snelders, D., Wieringen, P.C.W.: ‘Most advanced, yet acceptable’: typicality and novelty as joint predictors of aesthetic preference in industrial design. Br. J. Psychol. 94, 111–124 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1348/000712603762842147
Hung, W.-K., Chen, L.-L.: Effects of novelty and its dimensions on aesthetic preference in product design. Int. J. Des. 6(3), 81–90 (2012)
Husserl, E.: The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Northwestern University Press, Evanston (1936)
Itti, L., Koch, C., Niebur, E.: A model of saliency-based visual attention for rapid scene analysis. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 20(11), 1254–1259 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1109/34.730558
Isherwood, S.: Graphics and semantics: the relationship between what is seen and what is meant in icon design. In: Harris, D. (ed.) EPCE 2009. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 5639, pp. 197–205. Springer, Heidelberg (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-02728-4_21
Ivory, M., Sinha, R., Hearst, M.: Empirically validated web page design metrics. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 53–60. ACM Press, New York (2001). https://doi.org/10.1145/365024.365035
Jokinen, J.P.P.: User psychology of emotional user experience. University Press, University of Jyväskylä. Doctoral Dissertation (2015)
Jokinen, J.P.P., Silvennoinen, J., Kujala, T.: Relating experience goals with visual user interface design. Interact. Comput. 30(5), 378–395 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1093/iwc/iwy016
Jokinen, J.P.P., Silvennoinen, J., Perälä, P., Saariluoma, P.: Quick affective judgments: validation of a method for primed product comparisons. In: Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 2221–2230. ACM Press, New York (2015). https://doi.org/10.1145/2702123.2702422
Kant, I.: Critique of pure reason. English translation by Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (1998). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1787)
Kepes, G.: Language of Vision. Paul Theobold, Chicago (1944)
Kim, J., Lee, J., Choi, D.: Designing emotionally evocative homepages: an empirical study of the quantitative relations between design factors and emotional dimensions. Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud. 59, 899–994 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2003.06.002
Koffka, K.: Principles of Gestalt Psychology. Harcourt. Brace & World, New York (1935)
Krippendorff, K.: On the essential contexts of artifacts or on the proposition that “design is making sense (of things).” Des. Issues 5(2), 9–39 (1989). https://doi.org/10.2307/1511512
Krippendorff, K.: Content Analysis: An Introduction to Its Methodology. Sage, Thousand Oaks (2004)
Krippendorff, K.: The Semantic Turn: A New Foundation for Design. Taylor & Francis CRC Press, Boca Raton, London, New York (2006)
Kurosu, M., Kashimura, K.: Apparent usability vs. inherent usability: experimental analysis on the determinants of the apparent usability. In: Proceedings of Conference Companion on Human Factors in Computing Systems (1995). https://doi.org/10.1145/223355.223680
Laudan, L.: Progress and its Problems. University of California Press, Berkeley (1977)
Lavie, T., Tractinsky, N.: Assessing dimensions of perceived visual aesthetics of web sites. Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud. 60(3), 269–298 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2003.09.002
Lavie, T., Oron-Gilad, T., Meye, J.: Aesthetics and usability of in-vehicle navigation displays. Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud. 69(1), 80–99 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2010.10.002
Leder, H., Belke, B., Oeberst, A., Augustin, D.: A model of aesthetic appreciation and aesthetic judgments. Br. J. Psychol. 95(4), 489–508 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1348/0007126042369811
Lin, Y.-C., Yeh, C.-H., Wei, C.-C.: How will the use of graphics affect visual aesthetics? A user-centered approach for web page design. Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud. 71(3), 217–227 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2012.10.013
Liu, Y., Goncalves, J., Ferreira, D., Xiao, B., Hosio, S, Kostakos, V.: CHI 1994–2013: mapping two decades of intellectual progress through co-word analysis. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems – CHI 2014, pp. 3553–3562 ACM Press, New York (2014). https://doi.org/10.1145/2556288.2556969
Ludden, G., Schifferstein, H., Hekkert, P.: Visual–tactual incongruities in products as sources of surprise. Empir. Stud. Arts 27(1), 61–87 (2009). https://doi.org/10.2190/EM.27.1.d
Marković, S.: Components of aesthetic experience: aesthetic fascination, aesthetic appraisal, and aesthetic emotion. i-Perception 3, 1–17 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1068/i0450aap
Martindale, C., Moore, K., Borkum, J.: Aesthetic preference: anomalous findings for Berlyne’s psychobiological theory. Am. J. Psychol. 53–80 (1990)
McDougall, S., Isherwood, S.: What’s in a name? The role of graphics, functions, and their interrelationships in icon identification. Behav. Res. Methods 41(2), 325–336 (2009). https://doi.org/10.2307/1423259
Michailidou, E., Harper, S., Bechhofer, S.: Visual complexity and aesthetic perception of web pages. In: Proceedings of the 26th Annual ACM International Conference on Design of Communication, pp. 215–224. ACM Press, New York (2008). https://doi.org/10.1145/1456536.1456581
Miniukovich, A., De Angeli, A.: Computation of interface aesthetics. In: Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 1163–1172. ACM Press, New York (2015). https://doi.org/10.1145/2702123.2702575
Moshagen, M., Thielsch, M.: Facets of visual aesthetics. Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud. 68(10), 689–709 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2010.05.006
Mullet, K., Sano, D.: Designing Visual Interfaces: Communication Oriented Techniques. Prentice Hall, New Jersey (1995)
Newell, A., Simon, H.A.: Human Problem Solving. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs (1972)
Ngo, D., Byrne, J.: Application of an aesthetic evaluation model to data entry screens. Comput. Hum. Behav. 17, 149–185 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1016/S0747-5632(00)00042-X
Ngo, D., Byrne, J.: Modelling interface aesthetics. Inf. Sci. 152, 25–46 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1016/S0020-0255(02)00404-8
Obrist, M., Seah, S., Subramanian, S.: Talking about tactile experiences. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 1659–1668. ACM Press, New York (2013). https://doi.org/10.1145/2470654.2466220
Osgood, C., May, W., Miron, M.: Cross-Cultural Universals of Affective Meaning. University of Illinois Press, Champaign (1975)
Park, S., Choi, D., Kim, J.: Visualizing e-brand personality: exploratory studies on visual attributes and e-brand personalities in Korea. Int. J. Hum.-Comput. Interact. 19(1), 7–34 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327590ijhc1901_3
Post, R., Blijlevens, J., Hekkert, P.: ‘To preserve unity while almost allowing for chaos’: testing the aesthetic principle of unity-in-variety in product design. Acta Psychol. (Amst.) 163, 142–152 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2015.11.013
Postrel, V.: The Substance of Style. How Aesthetic Value is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness. HarperCollins Publishers, New York (2003)
Reber, R., Schwarz, N., Winkielman, P.: Processing fluency and aesthetic pleasure: is beauty in the perceiver´s processing experience? Pers. Soc. Psychol. Rev. 8(4), 364–382 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327957pspr0804_3
Reinecke, K., et al.: Predicting users’ first impressions of website aesthetics with a quantification of perceived visual complexity and colorfulness. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 2049–2058. ACM Press, New York (2013). https://doi.org/10.1145/2470654.2481281
Saariluoma, P.: Chess Players’ Thinking. Routledge, London (1995)
Saariluoma, P.: Foundational Analysis. Presuppositions in Experimental Psychology. Routledge, London, UK (1997)
Saariluoma, P.: Apperception, content-based psychology and design. In: Lindemann, U. (ed.) Human Behaviour in Design, pp. 72–78. Springer, Berlin (2003). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-07811-2_8
Saariluoma, P.: Explanatory frameworks for interaction design. In: Pirhonen, A., Isomäki, H., Roast, C., Saariluoma, P. (eds.) Future Interaction Design, pp. 67–83. Springer, London (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/1-84628-089-3_5
Saariluoma, P., Oulasvirta, A.: User psychology: Re-assessing the boundaries of a discipline. Psychology 1(5), 317–328 (2010). https://doi.org/10.4236/psych.2010.15041
Santayana, G.: The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outline of Aesthetic Theory. (Original work published in 1896). Dover, New York (1955)
Schenkman, B., Jönsson, F.: Aesthetics and preferences of web pages. Behav. Inf. Technol. 19(5), 367–377 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1080/014492900750000063
Seckler, M., Opwis, K., Tuch, A.: Linking objective design factors with subjective aesthetics: an experimental study on how structure and color of websites affect the facets of users’ visual aesthetic perception. Comput. Hum. Behav. 49, 375–389 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2015.02.056
Silvennoinen, J.: Apperceiving Visual Elements in Human-technology Interaction Design. Jyväskylä studies in computing, 261. Jyvaskyla University Press, Jyvaskyla (2017)
Silvennoinen, J., Jokinen, J.P.P.: Appraisals of salient visual elements in web page design. In: Advances in Human-Computer Interaction Article ID 3676704, 14 p. (2016). https://doi.org/10.1155/2016/3676704
Silvennoinen, J., Jokinen, J.P.P.: Aesthetic appeal and visual usability in four icon design eras. In: Proceedings of the 2016 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems – CHI 2016, pp. 4390–4400. ACM Press, New York (2016). https://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858462
Silvennoinen, J., Rousi, R., Jokinen, J.P.P., Perälä, P.: Apperception as a multisensory process in material experience. In: Proceedings of the Academic Mindtrek, pp. 144–151. ACM Press, New York (2015). https://doi.org/10.1145/2818187.2818285
Skinner, B.F.: Contingencies of Reinforcement: A Theoretical Analysis. Appleton-Century-Crofts, New York (1969)
Sonderegger, A., Sauer, J.: The influence of design aesthetics in usability testing: effects on user performance and perceived usability. Appl. Ergon. 41(3), 403–410 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apergo.2009.09.002
Thielsch, M., Hirschfeld, G.: Spatial frequencies in aesthetic website evaluations – explaining how ultra-rapid evaluations are formed. Ergonomics 55(7), 731–742 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1080/00140139.2012.665496
Tinio, P., Smith, J. (eds.): The Cambridge Handbook of the Psychology of Aesthetics and the Arts. Cambridge University Press, United Kingdom (2014)
Tractinsky, N., Avivit, C., Kirschenbaum, M., Sharfi, T.: Evaluating the consistency of immediate aesthetic perceptions of web pages. Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud. 64(11), 1071–1083 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2006.06.009
Tractinsky, N., Katz, A., Ikar, D.: What is Beautiful is Usable. Interact. Comput. 13(2), 127–145 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1016/S0953-5438(00)00031-X
Tuch, A., Presslaber, E., Stöcklin, M., Opwis, K., BargasAvila, J.: The role of visual complexity and prototypicality regarding first impression of websites: working towards understanding aesthetic judgments. Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud. 70, 794–811 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2012.06.003
Veryzer, R., Hutchinson, W.: The influence of unity and prototypicality on aesthetic responses to new product designs. J. Consum. Res. 24(4), 374–394 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1086/209516
Wertheimer, M.: Laws of organization in perceptual forms. In: Ellis W.D. (ed.) A Source Book of Gestalt Psychology, pp. 71–88. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Company (1938)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Silvennoinen, J. (2021). Interactionist Approach to Visual Aesthetics in HCI. In: Soares, M.M., Rosenzweig, E., Marcus, A. (eds) Design, User Experience, and Usability: UX Research and Design. HCII 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12779. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78221-4_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78221-4_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-78220-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-78221-4
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)