Determinants of the apparent usability [user interfaces]

For the purpose of comparing the concept of the apparent usability with the concept of the intended inherent usability and the experienced inherent usability, two psychological experiments were conducted to see how much the apparent usability is related to the inherent usability. In both experiments, two kinds of usability concepts showed low correlations with each other. The result indicated that the apparent usability is a different concept from the inherent usability and is rather related to the visual impression of the interface. This result also means that the inherent usability is difficult to be understood by just looking at the interface and suggests that the interface designers have to make efforts to make the interface “look” usable as well as to make it “actually” usable