An experiment was conducted to test the relationships between users' perceptions of a computerized system's beauty and usability. The experiment used a computerized application as a surrogate for an Automated Teller Machine (ATM). Perceptions were elicited before and after the participants used the system. Pre-experimental measures indicate strong correlations between system's perceived aesthetics and perceived usability. Post-experimental measures indicated that the strong correlation remained intact. A multivariate analysis of covariance revealed that the degree of system's aesthetics affected the post-use perceptions of both aesthetics and usability, whereas the degree of actual usability had no such effect. The results resemble those found by social psychologists regarding the effect of physical attractiveness on the valuation of other personality attributes. The ®ndings stress the importance of studying the aesthetic aspect of human±computer interaction (HCI) design and its relationships to other design dimensions.

Computer-mediated collaboration, a rapidly expanding form of work, introduces unique opportunities but problems as well. One of these problems is the higher risk of misunderstandings. Current communication theories suggest that misunderstanding may be reduced by contextualization, i.e., providing contextual information to explain a core message. However, we hypothesize that contextualization is beneficial in some situations but not in others. Treating contextualization as a form of adaptive behavior, we propose a model for understanding its contingent impact on performance in collaborative tasks. We explain the motivation for contextualization and argue that it can be predicted by the extent to which the perspectives of the collaborators are different or shared: A difference of perspectives between collaborators motivates them to contextualize to increase mutual understanding (MU) and thereby increase performance. Computer support should also motivate communicators to contextualize by making it easier for them to do so. A controlled experiment tests these relationships in a collaborative machine-assembly task performed by dyads. We manipulate the collaborators’ perspectives and the level of computer support, and we measure contextualization behavior, MU, and performance. Results show that contextualization is effective only for dyads with different perspectives and may be detrimental when perspectives are similar.

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Since database conceptual modeling is a complex cognitive activity, finding an appropriate pedagogy to deliver the topic to novice database designers is a challenge for Information Systems (IS) educators. The four-level TSSL model that is known in the area of human-computer interactions (HCI) is used to explain and demonstrate how instructional design can minimize extraneous cognitive load in the conceptual modeling task of designing a database schema. The instructional design approach puts focus on the syntactic level of TSSL, to explain how visualizing gradual transitions between hierarchic levels of the schema is effective in database modeling. The current work demonstrates the approach, and at the next phase we plan to experimentally test the effectiveness of the approach by comparing performance and attitudes of students who are exposed to emphasizing the syntax of the gradual transitions in schema structure to those who are not exposed to it.