UsersÆ perceptions of the appearance and the usability of an interactive system are two integral parts that contribute to the usersÆ experience of the system. ôActual usabilityö represents a system value that is revealed either during usability testing and related methods by experts or during use by the target users. Perceived usability is an assumption about a systemsÆ usability that has been made prior to, or independent of, its use. Theappearance of a product can inadvertently affect its perceived usability;however, their relationship has not been systematically explored. The author describes an approach that uses ôperceptual mapsö to visualize the relationship between perceived usability and subjective appearance. A group of professional designers rated representative car infotainment systems fortheir subjective appearance; a group of usability experts rated the same models for their perceived usability. The author applied multidimensional scaling (MDS) to project the ratings into the same Euclidean space. The results show certain overlap between the perceptions of product appearance and usability. The implications of this approach for designing interactive systems are discussed.
Samenvatting