Masaaki Kurosu

Who they are

Kurosu's affiliation is given here as it appears on the 1995 paper, which is the work this site draws on.

This page records only what the paper and its published record state. Biography beyond the cited work is not given here.

Key papers

Apparent usability vs. inherent usability (1995), with Kashimura. The sample screen came from a cash dispenser. A first group of 26 people, including interface designers, industrial designers, engineers and secretaries, each produced a layout for it. Then 252 students, 156 from a design school and 96 studying psychology, rated the 26 layouts on two ten-point scales: how easy each looked to use, and how beautiful it looked.

The two ratings were closely related, with a correlation of 0.589. The authors compared the apparent usability ratings with measures of inherent usability, such as the order in which the eye would scan the screen and the order of operations. Most of those correlations were low, with familiarity the main exception. The authors concluded that apparent usability is less correlated with inherent usability than with apparent beauty, and that designers should attend to appearance as well as to inherent usability.

Key ideas

The study is an early demonstration that looks colour judgements of function, which is the halo effect applied to an interface. Richard Shotton's The Illusion of Choice (2023) uses it in its chapter on the halo effect, at page 164, as an example of the effect reaching beyond faces to products.

The result concerns how easy a design appears, not how well people actually perform with it.

---