The "Beauty Dilemma": Beauty is Valued but ... - ACM Digital Library

CHI 2009 ~ The Beauty Dilemma

April 8th, 2009 ~ Boston, MA, USA

The "Beauty Dilemma": Beauty is Valued but Discounted in Product Choice Sarah Diefenbach Department of Psychology University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany [email protected]

Marc Hassenzahl Design, Folkwang University, Essen, Germany Media City, Åbo Akademi University, Finland [email protected]

ABSTRACT

The empirical study of aesthetics in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is concerned with – among other topics – the relationship between beauty and usability and the general impact of beauty on product choice and use. Specifically, the present paper explores the notion of a "beauty dilemma" – the idea that people discount beauty in a choice situation, although they value it in general (i.e., they are not choosing what makes them happy). We explored this idea in three studies with a total of over 600 participants. Study 1 revealed a reluctance to pay for beauty due to its hedonic nature (i.e., associated with luxury etc.). Study 2 showed that people prefer a more beautiful product, but justify their choice by referring to spurious advantages in usability. Finally, Study 3 revealed that a choice situation which requires a trade-off between beauty and usability, and which offers no further way to justify choosing beauty, leads to a sharp increase in the preference of usability. The underlying reasons for this "beauty dilemma" and further implications are discussed. Author Keywords

User Experience, aesthetics, beauty, product choice, beauty dilemma. ACM Classification Keywords

H5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI): Miscellaneous. INTRODUCTION

Aesthetics in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is a recent but rapidly growing field. Triggered by early studies on the relationship between beauty and usability [e.g., 19] and taken up by attempts to more fundamentally rethink the scope of HCI [e.g., 12], aesthetics has already become an integral topic of HCI. One strand of research on aesthetics focuses on judgments of visual beauty and explores their impact on the adoption Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. CHI 2009, April 4–9, 2009, Boston, MA, USA. Copyright 2009 ACM 978-1-60558-246-7/09/04...$5.00.

and use of interactive products [20, 5]. In this context, Hassenzahl [5, p. 291] defined a judgment of beauty as "a predominantly affect-driven evaluative response to the visual Gestalt of an object." Thus, based on a product's visual appearance, people may judge it to be beautiful (or not) and will accordingly attach beauty (or the lack of it) as an attribute to the product. These attributions are remarkably fast and stable [11, 18]. Unlike other attributes, such as judgments about a product's usability, beauty requires limited experience with the product itself. Beauty is perceived immediately – it takes effect on product perception and evaluation right from the first glimpse. In general, it seems out of question that beauty is important and adds to a product's value. As Raymond Loewy, influential designer of the last century, put it "between two products equal in price, function and quality, the one with the most attractive exterior will win." "Beauty sells" appears to be a universal truism [e.g., 1]. The present paper will challenge this view. Its general message is that although people value beauty, they may fail to fully take it into account when choosing a product. In other words, they may choose against their own later preferences. We will first summarize current research on choice and decision making to describe the underlying reasons for this "beauty dilemma". Second, we present three empirical studies focusing on the potential tension between beauty and usability supporting our notion. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings for HCI and design. REASONS FOR THE BEAUTY DILEMMA

One important source of the "beauty dilemma" is what Hsee and colleagues call "lay rationalism" [8]. People want to choose rationally. Due to this, they tend to attach greater importance to product attributes, which are "hard" (i.e., unambiguous, or even expressed in numbers), or related to the core function of a product. "Soft" or peripheral attributes are less considered. However, these attributes can nevertheless be important for the later overall product experience. Hsee and colleagues [8], for example, showed that people tend to focus on the picture quality of a TV set while choosing, although they are well aware of the fact that the later TV experience needs a good balance between picture and sound quality. By "lay rationalism", people may

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end up with a suboptimal choice, precisely because they wish to be sober and rational. Beauty in interactive products possesses all the characteristics of a peripheral and ambiguous attribute. Unlike jewelry or clothes, interactive products are primarily perceived as "tools". They can be easily reduced to a core function, such as "making a telephone call," "taking a picture" or "listening to music." By that, beauty will be always thought of as only peripheral; a mere extra to a product's core function. In addition, beauty appears hard to grasp and quantify, which is typical for "soft" attributes. Hsee [8] showed that an attribute expressed in numbers receives more weight in a choice situation – independent of its actual content. The peripheral and ambiguous nature of beauty in interactive products creates an air of "irrationality”. As long as people experience an urge to display a certain "rationalism" and soberness, beauty might not be the most straightforward argument for a choice. In addition, people may even be afraid of being overwhelmed by their spontaneous preferences triggered by beauty. The consequence is an active discounting of beauty in choice. Admittedly, neglecting peripheral and ambiguous attributes can be a valid choice heuristic: given the choice between a pain killer which tastes sweet and a more efficient pain killer which tastes bitter, it is just reasonable to focus on pain reduction, but not on the more experiential and peripheral attribute "taste". However, interactive products are more complex than pain killers and a "good" experience may depend on more than just the proper fulfillment of a core function, such as "making a telephone call". Specifically beauty may be important for the later experience because of its "social meaning", its role in building an emotional attachment to the product and it may even have impact on the task accomplishment itself [see 5, 20 for an overview]. The psychological reason for discounting peripheral and ambiguous attributes may be a general difficulty to justify a choice based on these attributes. From consumer research it is known that hedonic consumption – which includes choosing and using products because of their beauty or other hedonic attributes – is associated with luxury, guilt and waste [e.g., 9, 10, 17]. Consequently, people show specific behavioral tendencies in conjunction with hedonic consumption, which are assumed to apply to beauty as well. These are a preference to pay for hedonic goods with time rather than money [14], a stronger focus on pragmatic, functional attributes in a public compared to a private context [2] and a tendency to prefer hedonic products as prizes rather than purchases [13]. Justification may play a role in the context of interactive products as well. For example, Tractinsky and Zmiri [21] analyzed the preference for mp3-players and identified differences in "beauty/design" as crucial for choice. However, when asked about their personal choice criteria,

participants emphasized the pragmatic aspects. Diefenbach and Hassenzahl [3] showed that participants prefer a predominantly beautiful to a predominantly usable mobile phone, but only when they are given an easy opportunity to justify their choice. In an unpublished follow up-study, Diefenbach again asked people to choose among different mobile phones, which were either predominantly beautiful or predominantly usable. Participants also specified to what extent they considered justification of their choice, how difficult it was to reach a decision and finally their affective state after having made their choice. In this study, participants with a higher need for justification rather chose the usable over the beautiful phone. Choosing beauty in turn was associated with an increased choice difficulty but also with more positive post-choice affect. In other words, driven by the need for justification, people may choose the product with less positive affective impact. To summarize: although we do value beauty, and although it may positively contribute to our overall experience of a product, it is likely to be discounted in product choice. This is due to its peripheral, ambiguous and soft nature, which makes it hard to justify. THE STUDIES

The following three studies have the common theme of demonstrating the impact of beauty on the outcome of choice and the choice process itself (e.g., choice difficulty). Approaching an attribute’s impact in real-life choices by assessing preferences for an assortment of products with contradictory specifications on certain attributes is a commonly used method in marketing research, for example, this is the basic idea of the various techniques based on conjoint analysis [see 4 for an overview]. In order to explore our assumption of a “beauty dilemma” we contrast the peripheral attribute "beauty" with the more central attribute "usability." In our studies, beauty and usability are presented as attributes of a product. Note that this does not imply that beauty or usability is an actual feature of the object. An attribute is the consequence of an attribution process, which relates an experience of beauty to a particular object and establishes it as the cause of this experience. This is akin to affect attribution [e.g., 15], where felt arousal and negative valence is, for example, attributed to a bear ("I'm afraid of the bear"), which will in turn become an attribute of the object itself ("The bear is frightening", which actually means "the bear is able to cause fear"). A central challenge of our studies is to ensure that people agree on differences in beauty of the objects we study. To achieve this, we used two different strategies, both common in psychology and consumer research. One strategy was to provide external attribute values (Study 1), that is, in our case, to set a product’s beauty to a particular value, e.g., "beautiful," "ugly". The other strategy was to use objects, which are pre-tested to differ in beauty, and to rely on a

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similar judgment and attribution in the actual experiment (Study 2 and 3).

much harder to justify, because beauty does not directly contribute to the primary function of a mobile phone.

In general, the three studies used different approaches. This is to explore the robustness of the underlying theme, the "beauty dilemma". Converging findings from different approaches will add to the credibility and robustness of the underlying idea.

Accordingly, we expected that:

Study 1: Is beauty worth paying for?

In our first study, participants were required to choose between two different mobile phones. In general, one mobile phone offered a higher value on a given attribute, but was also more expensive than the other (by 50%). The attributes were either usability or beauty. In other words, half of the participants were asked to choose between a more usable but more expensive and a neutral but cheaper phone. The other half was asked to choose between a more beautiful but more expensive and a neutral but cheaper phone. The mobile phones were only described; no pictures were provided. Usability and beauty were introduced as attributes and those attributes’ values were given as relative descriptors ("more beautiful," "more usable"). Prices were provided in Euro. One may argue, that buying a product without even having seen it, is a setting too artificial. However, keep in mind that the purpose of this first study was not to simulate a real purchase, but to test the idea that people are more reluctant to spend money on beauty compared to usability. For this, we needed to make sure that the higher selling price of the "better" phone is perceived as being solely due to a difference in a particular attribute value. This can be most unambiguously achieved by using explicit, textual descriptors, such as "more usable". In addition to the between-subjects variable of attribute (usability, beauty), we also varied the general price level (low, high) as a between-subjects variable to control potential effects (see Table 1 for an overview of the resulting four choice situations). attribute price level low

usability neutral, 40€ more usable, 60€

beauty neutral, 40€ more beautiful, 60€

high

neutral, 100€ more usable, 150€

neutral, 100€ more beautiful, 150€

Table 1: Four different choice situations (between-subjects) (Study 1)

The choice situation allows for a direct test of the "beauty dilemma". In general, we assume a preference for the "better" phone (i.e., more beautiful, more usable), given that the price difference is not too big. However, whether this holds true, may depend on whether the respective attribute is regarded as central or peripheral. As long as usability is a central attribute, closely linked to the primary function of a mobile phone, the extra expense on an increase in usability is easy to justify. Improvements in beauty, however, will be

• H1: The more usable (and more expensive) mobile phone will be chosen more frequently than the more beautiful (and more expensive) phone In addition to the choice rates, which we expected to reflect a "norm" that usability is worth paying for, but beauty is not, we also studied the perceived difficulty of choice. In general, choosing against a norm induces conflict, which will result in an increase in experienced choice difficulty. In the present study, we thus expected that: • H2a: Given the attribute is beauty, the choice will be rated as more difficult by participants, who finally chose the more beautiful (and more expensive) phone compared to those who chose the neutral (less expensive) one • H2b: Given the attribute is usability, the choice will be rated as less difficult by participants, who finally chose the more usable (more expensive) phone compared to those who chose the neutral (less expensive) one To test H2a and b we used the actual choice (neutral and less expensive, better and more expensive) as a third variable to test for the assumed interaction of actual choice and attribute on choice difficulty. In sum, we used a 2x2 between-subjects experimental design with attribute (beauty, usability) and price level (low, high) as independent variables and choice and perceived choice difficulty as dependent variables. For testing H2a and b, we additionally used actual choice (neutral/less expensive, better/more expensive) as a quasiexperimental, between-subjects variable. The study was conducted as an online survey (in German). Participants (N=422, 261 female, mean age=38 years, min=16, max=70) were randomly assigned to the four conditions. The introductory part of the survey presented the following scenario: "Imagine you need a new mobile phone. You already planned to spend all of your recent, unexpected monetary birthday present." Participants in the low price level condition got a present of 100€, participants in the high price level condition got 250€. We introduced the birthday present to create a "windfall", i.e., some extra, unexpected money, to avoid reasoning about whether one can afford the expense or not. Note, that the “birthday money” always exceeded the price of the mobile phone, which is assumed to create a general feeling of having "saved" some money, even if one chooses the more expensive alternative. Participants were then asked to choose one of the two alternatives and to rate their experienced difficulty "to come up with a choice" (on a five-point-scale from 1=very low to 5=very high). As expected (H1), choice rates differed significantly depending on whether the attribute was beauty or usability

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(chi-square test of association, χ2=24.4; df=1; p