ABSTRACT
Aesthetics has been object of many investigations over the past centuries. However, over the last decades, the subject has broadened to include the understanding of how art is related to what people feel and how they learn. The American Heritage Dictionary defines Aesthetics as the study of the psychological responses to beauty and artistic experiences. Aesthetics is an important part of the human experience and, far from being opposed to function, aesthetics is a complement to function (Norman, 2004). The literature shows evidence that aesthetics influence users’ perception of usability. It also shows many theories about how to measure beauty and achieve aesthetic pleasure. The motivation for studying aesthetics applied to VLEs is that its acceptance by the user could be strongly related to its appearance and so influences the users’perception of usability. For the purposes of this experiment, we operationalize aesthetics as the use of design principles during the development of the interfaces of a VLE environment.
