Lesson 11 (Design - Looks)

This lesson is on the “looks” of a product. In other words, it means the aesthetic (usability) effect of the product. This is one of the important element is design as it has significant implications regarding the acceptance, use, and performance of the design. This is true as people do judge books by its cover, so impression (entry point to a system) of a system greatly influences subsequent perceptions and attitudes, and even the quality of the quality of interactions.

Attractiveness bias also plays a major role, as there’s a tendency to see attractive people/elements as more intelligent, competent, moral, and sociable than unattractive ones, and they tend to receive more attention compared to the latter.

Next, we are introduced to “Berlyne’s model of aesthetics”. In short, this relays the message that people don’t enjoy products that are either too simple or too complicated; like those that are moderately familiar and will be averse to the novel and the over familiar. Besides that, there’s also a trade-off between flexibility and usability of a system. “Flexibility is inversely proportional to Usability”.

To enable users to have a perfect experience of using a product, there must be “perception management” (looks, function and feel), and to take care of the “touch points” (Product, packaging, brand, distribution, retail, office, support, media). This involves “Usability Testing”, which compromises of “Heuristic Evaluation”, and “User Evaluation”. The 1st component is performed by an expert in that particular field of the product, while the latter involves the interaction of the users and how they feel about the product.

Thus, this means that a high-fidelity prototype, and heuristic and user evaluations must be ready for next week final presentation.

Below is the interface of the low-fidelity prototype that we have developed.