The Implicit Aesthetic Preference for Mobile Marketing Interface Layout-An ERP Study.

Shu Wang,Austin Shijun Ding,Liang Xiao,Chonghuan Xu

doi:10.3389/fnhum.2021.728895

Shu Wang, Austin Shijun Ding + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2021.728895

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Abstract

Businesses and scholars have been trying to improve marketing effect by optimizing mobile marketing interfaces aesthetically as users browse freely and aimlessly through mobile marketing interfaces. Although the layout is an important design factor that affects interface aesthetics, whether it can trigger customer's aesthetic preferences in mobile marketing remains unexplored. To address this issue, we employ an empirical methodology of event-related potentials (EPR) in this study from the perspective of cognitive neuroscience and psychology. Subjects are presented with a series of mobile marketing interface images of different layouts with identical marketing content. Their EEG waves were recorded as they were required to distinguish a target stimulus from the others. After the experiment, each of the subjects chose five stimuli interfaces they like and five they dislike. By analyzing the ERP data derived from the EEG data and the behavioral data, we find significant differences between the disliked interfaces and the other interfaces in the ERP component of P2 from the frontal-central area in the 200–400 ms post-stimulus onset time window and LPP from both the frontal-central and parietal-occipital area in the 400–600 ms time window. The results support the hypothesis that humans do make rapid implicit aesthetic preferences for interface layouts and suggest that even under a free browsing context like the mobile marketing context, interface layouts that raise high emotional arousal can still attract more user attention and induce users' implicit aesthetic preference.

Highlights

The global pandemic of COVID-19 has created a huge shift for both markers and customers by introducing a heavier dependency on mobile marketing (Ayush et al, 2020)
The findings of our study are critical to understand the mechanism of how the interface layout affects the human aesthetic experience and can benefit the mobile marketers by providing a deeper understanding of their marketing interface designs, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic
The eventrelated potentials (ERP) data are statistically analyzed by repeated-measures ANOVAs on each of the four post-stimulus onset time windows

Summary

Introduction

The global pandemic of COVID-19 has created a huge shift for both markers and customers by introducing a heavier dependency on mobile marketing (Ayush et al, 2020). The development of mobile marketing during the COVID-19 pandemic has witnessed a drastic growth of homogeneous marketing contents that are of little value to the users delivered through mobile marketing. The interface designs that carry mobile marketing contents attract user interaction intentions under this browsing paradigm before a careful scrutiny of the marketing contents. To interact with the mobile marketing system is to obtain information and use Implicit Aesthetic Preference for Layout functionalities, and to observe and experience the aesthetics of the interface layout. Under the free-browsing paradigm, the mechanism of how the interface layout affects the human aesthetic experience is still not wellunderstood, and whether the interface layout as a significant interface design feature can cause human implicit aesthetic preference or not remains unexplored

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