The rapid development of technology since world war II brought about dramatic changes in everyday life around us, forming new paradigm, so-called Information Society or Postindustrial Society. Designers who always seeking for mirroring needs of society to design became heavily influenced. One of those influences gave the birth of User-Interface Design. Designers who used to designing of tangible artifacts now tackle invisible software design.
However, the concept of user-interface, as always, was developed and implemented by other disciplines such as cognitive psychology and industrial engineering. Their main research interests have been focused on operational flow, control-layout, cognitive pattern an so forth which are not directly helpful for designers main tasks; configuring aesthetic attributes. Designers badly needs the designerly way of user-interface design, which can tell what specific attribute has what relations with user-interface design.
This study sets the objective to study the influence of aesthetic attributes on user-interface design. The study, at first, briefly looks through the nature of user-interface design and draws out the necessity of aesthetic oriented user-interface design. Then theories of aesthetics are studied from which aesthetic attributes as information sources are defined. A product is viewed a combination of aesthetic attributes and each attributes is hypothesized to have some influence of the performance of user-interface. Subsequently experiment is set and conducted. Various combinations of aesthetic attributes of microwave oven were generated by the orthogonal array from Conjoint Analysis. Every combinations was simulated by computer against which users performed two tasks. Their performances were recorded and evaluated by time taken and times was used for Conjoint Analysis for finding out how much influence each attribute made on the performance. A computer program UISA (User-Interface Simulation system of Aesthetic attributes) was developed for simulating, recording, and managing the experiment. The result of experiment was analyzed and findings were summarized. Finally future research were prospected.
