My interest in studying the aesthetic aspects of human-computer interaction (HCI) aroused serendipitously during ACM's CHI conference in 1995. Traditionally, the field of HCI has been led by task-oriented theories. The ultimate goal of the human-computer interaction according to these theories is efficient performance, usually operationalized in terms of minimizing execution times and errors. "Usability" is perhaps the most popular concepts advanced by HCI researchers and practitioners. Within this paradigm, aesthetic considerations are either ignored or relegated to a secondary role under the condition that they do not compromise the system's usability. This viewpoint was quite acceptable to me until I attended a short presentation at CHI '95 by Masaaki Kurosu. Masaaki studied the association between the interface's adherence to standard usability guidelines and users' perception of the design's usability. It turned out that following researchers' guidelines had little effect on whether users evaluated the design as usable. Interestingly, though, users' perceptions of usability were strongly related to their evaluations of the beauty of the interface. These intriguing results enticed me into running a series of experiments on the aesthetics of interfaces.

The results of our experiments suggest that aesthetic aspects of computer applications play an important role in how users evaluate and experience the system, not unlike similar phenomena found in the fields of social psychology and marketing. We corroborated findings about the relations between usability and aesthetics across cultures, and extended the results beyond the first impressions generated by the system. The findings of a recent study point towards a multidimensional view of aesthetics which may explain, in part, the relations between usability and aesthetics that were observed in earlier studies.

Our studies thus far have examined aesthetics from a relatively narrow and static viewpoint. The insights gained are still tentative and incomplete. Capturing, measuring, and manipulating more elaborated and dynamic models of the aesthetic/affective user experience would be a great challenge for future research in aesthetic computing.