Image by Capture Queen (TM)/Flickr Creative Commons

Have you ever found a website that upon first impression immediately struck you as, well, beautiful, but then when you started trying to actually use it or trying to find some information within those pretty pages, your impression of the website soured?

The results of a study at the Software Usability Research Laboratory at Witchita State University indicate that type of experience isn’t really that common, after all.

In fact, it seems pretty pages go a long way to determining a person’s positive perception of a website, whether the site works well or not.

“The visual appeal of an interface appears to play a role in the user’s rating on perceived usability,” say study authors Christine Phillips and Barbara S. Chaparro.

But if we’re going to believe them, we have to see how they define what’s usable, and how they determine a website is appealing.

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