Visual Appeal of Websites: The Durability of Initial Impressions

Abstract

This study aims to investigate how the visual appeal of a website design influences online users' immediate perceptions and their subsequent responses, especially engagement and intention to use websites. To test the durability of users' perceptions and responses, an experiment was conducted to examine the relationships between website visual appeal and user responses across different exposure times (1 second vs. no time constraint). The results suggest that website evaluations could be made quickly (within 1 second), and the relationships between web page components and user responses remain very consistent when users have no time constraint to evaluate the web page. In addition, the findings also suggest that the users spent significantly more time browsing website with a relatively high level of visual complexity. Moreover, data from heat maps indicate that, in general, online users are more interested in information presented in graphics, rather than text, format.