Visualizing user experience through "Perceptual maps": Concurrent assessment of perceived usability and subjective appearance in car infotainment systems

Users' perceptions of the appearance and the usability of an interactive system are two integral parts that contribute to the users' experience of the system. "Actual usability" represents a system value that is revealed either during usability testing and related methods by experts or during use by the target users. Perceived usability is an assumption about a systems' usability that has been made prior to, or independent of, its use. The appearance of a product can inadvertently affect its perceived usability; however, their relationship has not been systematically explored. We describe an approach that uses "perceptual maps" to visualize the relationship between perceived usability and subjective appearance. A group of professional designers rated representative car infotainment systems for their subjective appearance; a group of usability experts rated the same models for their perceived usability. We applied multidimensional scaling (MDS) to project the ratings into the same Euclidean space. The results show certain overlap between the perceptions of product appearance and usability. The implications of this approach for designing interactive systems are discussed.