Aesthetics and Design and Your Emotions

A List apart published In Defense of Eye Candy looking at how good aesthetic design decisions impacts our rational thinking:

This raises some interesting questions—especially in the area of decision making. In short, our rational choices aren’t so rational. From studies on choice to first impressions, neuroscience is exploring how the brain works—and it’s kind of scary. We’re not nearly as in charge of our decisions as we’d like to believe.

You've probably seen the research studies where nice-looking ATMs cognitively 'work better' than their uglier, but equally competent cousins. As real-time brain imaging becomes available to researchers, it's seems that the mind forms many 'rational' decisions first emotionally and then creates logic to match.

This might explain more of this effect:

I think there's probably more to a Mac than just the computer — it's the culture of trust that users place in the interactions which enables them to try something on a whim. When users are rewarded with successful dragging between applications, they try it more. When modifier keys have reliable 'concepts' like "The Option key makes my action apply to other similar things", users are more likely to try them. This is becoming more and more of a moot point as Windows has improved over the years, but the cultural lag, I believe, means this still applies more to Mac users on average.

Comments

[Cris 'atariboy' Pearson]

More a point on the cultural lag of mac vs windows than the rest of the article:

For geeky windows users, the greater keyboard controllability of Windows over Mac is one of the things things they often state as a big plus.

Across the OS, windows keystrokes are pretty consistent however I don't use keystrokes enough on windows to know if standards are as kept as close between 3rd party apps.