Beauty constructs for MP 3 players

This paper contributes to the current debate about the nature of beauty and aesthetics as they apply to interactive products. Current disagreement centres around the question of whether beauty should be viewed as a continuous property of objects or as a rare emotional response to object encounters (Hassenzahl 2004, Frohlich 2004). Here we develop a new perspective of beauty as a complex psychological construct, subject to competing influences from visible object properties such as shape and colour, and invisible object associations such as perceived ease of use and brand. We introduce a new methodology for examining such constructs based on a card sorting procedure, and use it to show how 36 participants think about the beauty of 35 MP3 players. One major finding is that participants tended to evaluate the players holistically, applying similar categorisations to free sorts, beauty sorts and preference sorts. This involved a common polarisation between modern and post-modern forms as they have been found to apply to architectural styles (Wilson 1996). INTRODUCTION The field of human computer interaction (HCI) was initially established to examine the relationship between people and computers, at a time when getting the computer to do what you wanted was a major challenge (e.g. Card, Moran & Newell 1983). Considerations of the beauty of a computer did not arise in this era, which was more dominated by considerations of error, incomprehension and frustration. Things are very different today in a context where the interfaces to personal computers have standardised around a handful of operating systems and common applications, and the design of the computer itself has become a differentiator for consumer sales. Computing resources are also assuming a variety of novel forms, as they become embedded in portable physical objects or situated architectural surfaces. This is leading to a merging of human computer interaction with product design and architecture, and a re-framing of questions of aesthetics, pleasure and fun as they apply to interactive experiences (e.g. Blythe et al 2003, Jordan 2000, McCarthy & Wright 2004, Norman 2004). One debate to arise out of these developments is about the nature of beauty and how it relates to digital products. A recent set of discussions have been published in the Human Computer Interaction journal, around a new study by Hassenzahl (HCI Special Issue 2004 Volume 19). Hassenzahl (2004) undertook a study to examine the beauty of software MP3 players and its relationship to other attributes such as usability and goodness, using a series of bipolar rating scales and correlations between them. He suggests that perceived beauty is more related to judgements of hedonic identification or self-presentation, than to judgements of usability or other kinds of hedonic stimulation (pleasure). This contradicts previous work which showed that perceptions of beauty affected perceptions of usability, such that ‘what is beautiful is usable’ (Tractinsky et al 2000). Irrespective of the particular findings reported, Hassenzahl’s paper has sparked a discussion about the nature of beauty in HCI and how to measure it. Hassenzahl’s view that beauty is a continuous property of an interactive artefact, whose extent can be measured on a simple rating scale, was challenged by Frohlich (2004). Frohlich observed that beauty has been defined differently in classical philosophy, as a rare all-or-nothing response to an object experienced in a particular context, and may not have been present at all in Hassenzahl’s experiment or others’ like it. He recommended studying beauty by collecting stories of