Is a beautiful website more usable? Psychological literature has discussed, for some time, the “what is beautiful is good” phenomenon. That is, we ascribe positive attributes to things that are more attractive.

This applies to people and likely to products and websites, as well. But does that positive halo also carry over to our impressions of website usability? It’s a bit of an open research question, but first, it needs to be considered: how reliable are impressions of website beauty?

In reviewing the literature on rating aesthetics, beauty and visual appeal, researchers often generate their own set of questions and scales to measure these somewhat fuzzy and overlapping constructs. There’s nothing wrong with creating new scales, but without any validation, there’s a risk that the way the items are worded may generate misleading or less accurate results than those from scales which have been subjected to psychometric validation.

How to Measure Visual Appeal