Attractive smartphone icons enhance user performance

Eye-catching graphics on smartphones or computers help people perform tasks quicker and more easily as the job gets more demanding, a new study suggests.
Investing a little bit extra to design aesthetically pleasing visuals for electronic devices, websites or anything people need to interact with will be beneficial in the long run, researchers said.
Irene Reppa of Swansea University and Sine McDougall of Bournemouth University used computer icons in the study because these visuals are well-defined stimuli and part of modern life.
In a search-and-localisation task, participants first memorised a target icon and then searched for it among an array of nine icons.

The assignment was designed to reflect the kind of task people perform when interacting with modern electronics. This includes finding and selecting icons representing tasks to be carried out from among a number of distracting symbols.
Simple and familiar icons were the easiest to find, but when the task got harder, aesthetically appealing icons provided a performance boost that was not found for less-appealing visuals, researchers said.

The researchers conclude that appealing icons are not only pleasant to use, but also speed up people's ability to solve multi-step problems with visuals when using websites or mobile phones.
Pleasing aesthetics prove to be most important under taxing conditions, such as when users deal with complex, abstract or unfamiliar material.

"Savings of even a few milliseconds at a time all add up when one is performing multi-step interactions on a website or a mobile phone," said Reppa.
"This might make people avoid some interfaces, such as certain websites or phones, in favour of those that maximise efficient performance," Reppa added.
The study was published in Springer's journal Psychonomic Bulletin and Review.