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January 04, 2004
Attractive Things Work Better
I came across Don Norman's site; he's the writer of Emotional Design. I wonder if the 'Attractive Things Work Better' can be applied to core software design and architecture. I'm not referring to GUI design, but more underlying architecture. From a coding perspective, good-looking code is always better for readability, maintenance and a hundred other reasons. For software architecure, what would be considered 'attractive'? Well certainly the target audience would most likely not be end-users, but other software architects and/or developers. It's possible we could define this as 'Attractive Architectures'.
From Emotional Design:
"Noam Tractinsky, an Israeli scientist, was puzzled. Attractive things certainly should be preferred over ugly ones, but why would they work better? Yet two Japanese researchers, Masaaki Kurosu and Kaori Kashimura1, claimed just that. They developed two forms of automated teller machines, the ATM machines that allow us to get money and do simple banking tasks any time of the day or night. Both forms were identical in function, the number of buttons, and how they worked, but one had the buttons and screens arranged attractively, the other unattractively. Surprise! The Japanese found that the attractive ones were easier to use."
Posted by 0xFF3300 at January 4, 2004 09:52 PM
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