The effect of prototypicality on webpage aesthetics, usability, and trustworthiness

Abstract

The user expects webpages of specific categories to have a look-and-feel specific to that category. For example, unlike university homepages, online-shop webpages typically feature relatively little text, a long grid-like structure listing products, and numerous functional elements for product search, filtering, and recommendation. Ensuring that a webpage meets user expectations makes it highly prototypical and improves the user impression of the webpage. Despite the potential impact on users, the concept of webpage prototypicality has not been fully explored or extensively employed in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). This paper addresses this gap by conducting a user study with 1530 participants to investigate webpage prototypicality. The study revealed a strong correlation between prototypicality and webpage visual aesthetics, perceived pre-use usability, and trustworthiness. Notably, the direct effect of prototypicality on trustworthiness outweighed the indirect effects through aesthetics and usability. Overall, prototypicality, aesthetics, and usability collectively accounted for 29% to 68% of the variance in trustworthiness, depending on a webpage category. These findings underscore the importance of embracing prototypicality within the field of HCI, encouraging its wider adoption.