Interesting article on web design aesthetics. Though, it’s really not about web design at all.  It could just as easily be about physical beauty of any kind.  I like the breakdown of these three levels of beauty appreciation:

The visceral (“gut”) processing level reacts quickly to appearances. It’s the visceral reaction to web pages that researchers measure when they detect reaction times as fast as 50 milliseconds. It’s crucial to understand that these instant good/bad visceral-level affective responses are largely unconscious: it can take seconds or minutes to become consciously aware of your first, visceral reaction to a stimulus—particularly a stimulus as complex as a web page.

Behavioral-level processing involves the more familiar aspects of usability: it responds to the feel of using the site, the functionality, the understandability of the structure and navigation, and the overall physical performance of the site. At this level, users are consciously aware of their attitudes toward the behavior of the system, and their reactions (pleasure, for example, or frustration) play out over seconds and minutes as users interact with a site. It’s at this behavioral level that techniques such as eyetracking are most powerful and trustworthy, because they offer detailed moment-by-moment evidence of what users consciously decided to look at and do to fulfill a given task.

Reflective processing of reactions is the most complex level, and typically involves a user’s personal sense of a site’s beauty, meaning, cultural context, and immediate usefulness. Reflective processing often triggers memories and encourages pragmatic judgments about the overall aesthetic worth and value of what a user sees. Eyetracking and traffic logs are irrelevant at this level, but user interviews can give you insight into your user’s reflective judgments.

via A List Apart: Articles: Visual Decision Making.

Particularly interesting is that both the pre- and post-processing is largely subconscious.  And our conscious mind sits between two much deeper pools of information gathering and processing.

This entry was posted by Buster on Wednesday, June 24th, 2009 at 3:59 am. It is filed under Responses. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.