Attractive UI’s work better!
Our emotional responses often govern our cognitive responses to problems - in simple words, “if a user has a positive emotional response towards a UI, then it is likely that he or she will stretch their cognitive functions to resolve any confusions or problems in using the UI”. Our emotions influence the way our mind tries to solve problems at hand.
I recently heard Don Norman’s (icon-o-cast) podcast interview with the guys at Lunar Design on his new book entitled Emotional Design. And I like his simple analogy to the same phenomenon, “the day I wash my car, it drives better”.
A lot of our scientific research has been focused on the effects on human performance of negative emotions like anger, fear etc. Little work has gone into the effect of positive emotions towards the things we use and the UI’s that work on everyday.
It is said that negative emotions towards UI’s narrows down our thought processes, making it more difficult to solve the problems that we encounter. Positive emotions on the other hand open up our thought processes and help us to look at more options in trying to solve the problem at hand.
This has great impact from the UI designers point of view - making it imperative to design UI’s that look good and feel good in the first place. Fitting the UI elements into a Grid Layout, using consistent Typefaces, using a pleasant color scheme, become critical in getting a positive emotional response from the end-user and in turn help in making the UI “work better”!