How User’s First Impression Forms on Mobile user Interface?: An ERPs Study

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn an era of mobile Internet, the using of mobile interfaces is ineluctable in our daily life. To some extent, the first impression of the mobile user interfaces determines users’ downloading and using behavior, even affects the overall user experience. In fact, the underlying neural mechanism of users’ first impression formation of mobile user interface is worthy to be investigated. Considering the process of first impression formation is always unconscious and transient, event-related potentials (ERPs), which are used to track users’ cerebral activities could be an appropriate method to explore this process. In the present study, the perceived usability and esthetics are taken as the evaluation dimensions of user’ first impression formation, and ERPs were used to investigate which dimensions were automatically activated when users browsed the mobile user interfaces passively without any explicit guidance. The ERPs results showed that N2 was dominated by perceived usability and esthetics, which reflected in enhanced N2 for high esthetics than for low esthetics, and larger N2 for high-perceived usability/high esthetics compared to low-perceived usability/low esthetics. Moreover, there was a larger late positive potential (LPP) for low esthetics interfaces with respect to high esthetics ones. The findings revealed that users could make an implicit evaluation spontaneously to the mobile user interfaces with different levels of perceived usability and esthetics. Furthermore, users’ first impression is significantly affected by the differences in esthetics but marginally influenced by the difference in perceived usability. The suggestions from this study for mobile application designers might be that the esthetics design of the mobile user interface should be prioritized in the early design stage.