Much work has been done on aesthetic perception of interfaces, 
perception of usability, and the relationship between aesthetics and 
perceived usability. The pilot project described here focuses on task 
performance, investigating whether there is any relationship between 
aesthetic features and users’ performance in word-creation tasks. In each 
task, experimental participants were presented with nine letters and 
asked to create as many valid words as they could from these letters. 


The aesthetic features investigated include colour, shape, font and layout; 
they (and their conditions) are all, as much as possible, related to what is 
known about perceptual processes from the psychology literature. The 
letter-sets used for the tasks were carefully chosen so as to ensure 
comparable difficulty with respect to the 12Dicts package of common 
English words.


Pre- and post-task preference data has also been collected. The data has 
not yet been fully analysed, and this talk will present what we have found 
so far (hot-off-the-press!)