Designing Effective Speech Interfaces

Aesthetic Integrity

Aesthetic Integrity is the sixth law and it reads: The interface will have an attractive and appropriate design.

Human Factors

In usability engineering work, we often focus on the performance aspects of an interface. Will it be easy to learn and use? Will people be able to get their work done efficiently? There is another aspect that can affect acceptability: preference. You can measure how well humans perform a set of tasks using an interface, but this does not mean that you have measured how well they liked performing the task with that interface.

It is not possible to totally separate human performance from preference.

Humans have emotional responses to most events. It is not possible to totally separate human performance from preference. To complicate matters, people often have preferences that go directly against performance data. In our experience, users often “prefer” poor interface designs that actually slow down their work, but are familiar.

The goal in interface design and usability engineering is to design an interface that maximizes both performance and preference, although this is not always possible.

Aesthetic Integrity refers to the issue of preference. For example, when users have completed their work, would they say they preferred using the interface over their previous method? Would they say that the experience was pleasant?

Aesthetic integrity is often tied to visual interfaces, GUIs, for example. Aesthetic integrity is important for all ...