A blessing, not a curse: Experimental evidence for beneficial effects of visual aesthetics on performance

Abstract

The present experiment investigated the effect of visual aesthetics on performance. A total of 257 volunteers completed a series of search tasks on a website providing health-related information. Four versions of the website were created by manipulating visual aesthetics (high vs. low) and usability (good vs. poor) in a 2 × 2 between-subjects design. Task completion times and error rates were used as performance measures. A main effect of usability on both error rates and completion time was observed. Additionally, a significant interaction of visual aesthetics and usability revealed that high aesthetics enhanced performance under conditions of poor usability. Thus, in contrast to the notion that visual aesthetics may worsen performance, visual aesthetics even compensated for poor usability by speeding up task completion. The practical and theoretical implications of this finding are discussed.

Keywords:

• aesthetics
• usability
• performance
• human–computer interaction
• website

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Helen-Rose Cleveland, Jennifer Nicolai and Martin Ostapczuk for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article as well as Axel Buchner for providing the spectrophotometer.