Speaking 'In Defense of Eye Candy' at UPA

For those of you in the DFW area, I’ll be speaking at Tuesday night’s DFW-UPA (Usability Professionals Association) meeting. That’s this Tuesday, July 15. If you can make it out, the meeting starts at 6pm; I’ll be presenting shortly thereafter (more info on meeting time and place here).

I’m excited, as this will be the first public appearance of my ‘Eye Candy’ presentation. I’m also curious as to how it will be received, especially by this audience. As I indicated in my original post on the topic, visual design— so called “eye candy”— get’s a bad rap, for the wrong reasons. This presentation is my way of stringing together some of the solid research and perspectives supporting the functional value of aesthetics.

Formal Description:
Graphics, eye candy, sexy interfaces— while these aren’t as seemingly strategic as say a mental model or BCG Matrix, it’s time to stand up for these misunderstand elements. Aesthetics play just as critical a role in business as picking the right server or insuring your data is accurate. But here’s the catch—it’s not about shiny buttons or gradient fades in and of themselves. Rather, it’s about “the psychological response to sensory stimulus.” It’s about people. And how people respond to these elements.

If we truly care about making things work for people, then we should care about aesthetics, or the science of “how things are know via the senses.” And it’s much more than graphic design: Sights. Sounds. Smells. Motion. Aesthetics is concerned about all the senses. And it’s about how people respond to these elements (and not the elements themselves).

To understand so-called “eye-candy” in proper context, it’s critical that we stop focusing on particular design elements (rounded corners or drop shadows, anyone?), and instead look at the response that is triggered by these elements. We’ll do just this, looking at a variety of design details, focusing not on their stylistic qualities but rather the cognitive and affective responses these details elicit. In doing so, we’ll skim across a variety of research findings from the last decade that will both confirm and challenge many of our assumptions about design.

Oh, and what do the chopsticks have to do with this presentation? You’ll have to make it out to find out! Hope to see you there.