Aesthetics in interactive products: Correlates and consequences of beauty
Beauty matters. Certainly, most people would agree. Beauty is an important ingredient of our daily lives. We admire and praise the beauty of nature, architecture, music, other people – an ugly color or an awkward form easily repels us. Given its pervasiveness, the lack of research addressing beauty (or aesthetics) in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is striking (see Tractinsky, 2005). HCI seems a "science of design" (Carroll, 1997) that long neglected beauty. A cursory search of the keyword "aesthetics" in the Association of Computing Machinery's (ACM) Digital Library (www.acm.org/dl), for example, showed 25% of all retrieved papers to be published in 2005. This is so far, the culmination of a growing interest in the topic, which had its starting point about 10 years ago.