The role of usability, aesthetics, and cognitive style on user preference for interactive applications

Understanding target users is a crucial issue in developing successful interactive applications. User preference needs to be given priority because it directly reflects a user's feelings toward applications' attributes and ultimately influences his or her decision to purchase or use an application with satisfaction. The present study focuses on a better understanding of user preferences based on perceived usability and perceived aesthetics. For this, previous empirical studies on the relationships among perceived usability, perceived aesthetics, user performance, and user preference are reviewed with the consideration of occurrence of actual use. Also, findings of the past studies are summarized and are discussed in terms of relationships of interest, variable measurements, experimental domains, types of participants, manipulations of usability and aesthetics factors, performance measures, and possible reasons of conflicting findings for a specific relationship. These factors are interrelated and are affected by each other in an experimental context. On the basis of the review and the discussion of the previous studies, several suggestions for future research (including our experiment in this study) are made to confirm or clarify existing findings by considering various influential factors, and a conceptual model for user preferences based on usability and aesthetics is constructed to show the processes of users. preference-making before and during/after actual use and to emphasize mutual influences and feedback loops in user experience.;To contribute to the comprehension of user preferences, we introduce a new methodology that simultaneously considers usability, aesthetics, cognitive style, and occurrence of actual use in a more concrete setting. Seventy-three engineering students participated in an experiment using four simulated systems with different levels of usability and aesthetics. The results showed that, before actual use, user preference was significantly affected by the aesthetics factor but marginally affected by the usability factor. On the other hand, after actual use, user preference was significantly influenced by both the usability and the aesthetics factors. Regardless of the occurrence of actual use, user preference was highly correlated with both perceived usability and perceived aesthetics, which were strongly interrelated. The occurrence of actual use had significant effects on perceived usability, perceived aesthetics, and user preference. In addition, before actual use, the effect of the aesthetics factor on user preference was significantly different between imagers and verbalizers, but that of the usability factor was not. The difference between imagers and verbalizers with respect to the effect of the aesthetics/usability factor on time performance was not sufficiently demonstrated, nor was the difference between the two cognitive styles with regard to the effect of the aesthetics/usability factor on user preference after actual use. The interaction effect between cognitive styles and actual use on user preference was not adequately significant. The findings provide several implications in understanding users. preference-making and in establishing design and marketing strategies for target users of interactive applications. Further studies are necessary to solve limitations of our experiment.