Webpage Aesthetics Research Articles

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

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.

Modeling how different user groups perceive webpage aesthetics

Aesthetics is a central consideration in user interface design. It is known to affect end-user behavior and perception, in particular the first impression of graphical user interfaces. However, what users perceive as pleasant or good design is highly subjective. We contribute a computational model that estimates the visual appeal of a given webpage for several common cohorts, or user groups, including gender, age, and education level. Our model, a convolutional neural network trained on 418 webpage screenshots having 771k aesthetic scores (in a 1–9 Likert scale) from 32k users, achieves high accuracy and is always less than 1 point off from ground-truth ratings. Designers can use our model to anticipate how people would rate their webpage, offer personalized designs according to the visual preferences of their users, and support rapid evaluations of webpage design prototypes for specific cohorts.

Perceived e-service quality and e-store loyalty: The moderated mediating effect of webpage aesthetics and e-customer satisfaction

Perceived e-service quality and e-store loyalty: The moderated mediating effect of webpage aesthetics and e-customer satisfaction

A Quantitative Approach to Measure Webpage Aesthetics

Aesthetics measurement is important in determining and improving the usability of a webpage. Wireframe models, the collection of the rectangular objects, can approximate the size and positions of the different webpage elements. The positional geometry of these objects is primarily responsible for determining aesthetics as shown in studies. In this work, the authors propose a computational model for predicting webpage aesthetics based on the positional geometry features. In this study, the authors found that ten out of the thirteen reported features are statistically significant for webpage aesthetics. Using these ten features, the authors developed a computational model for webpage aesthetics prediction. The model works on the basis of support vector regression. The authors rated the wireframe models of 209 webpages by 150 participants. The average users' ratings and the ten significant features' values were used to train and test the aesthetics prediction model. Five-fold cross-validation technique shows the model can predict aesthetics with a Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of only 0.42.

Predicting webpage aesthetics with heatmap entropy

ABSTRACT This paper introduces a descriptive global index for eye-tracking data called heatmap entropy, or visual attention entropy (VAE), and discerns its predictive value for webpage aesthetics. VAE represents the chaos, or uncertainty, in the allocation of visual attention. In the experiment, we tracked and recorded 30 observers' initial landings on 40 web pages displayed for 3 seconds each. The results show that the VAE and aesthetic ratings of the web pages are negatively correlated (). A calibrated form of VAE, known as relative VAE (rVAE), has a more significant correlation with the aesthetic ratings (). On its own, the rVAE can differentiate between good- and bad-looking pages to a certain degree of accuracy (two-class ANOVA with ). Further investigation reveals that the performances of both VAE and rVAE improve steadily after the first second, and could be better, if the tracking duration was longer than 3 seconds or if more observers were recruited.

Design and Implementation of 3D Effect Web Page Based on JavaScript Technology

With the development of Internet technology, people's production and life are greatly influenced. Web design is widely used in Internet world. Web design and user experience are inseparable. In the pursuit of webpage layout and aesthetics, but also to add user interaction functions, Dynamic effects technology based on JavaScript can achieve user interaction requirements. The perfect combination of JavaScript dynamic effects and interactive features is the best way to achieve webpage effects. This paper expounds the application method of JavaScript, and studies the special effect application of JavaScript technology in webpages through examples.

Webthetics: Quantifying webpage aesthetics with deep learning

Abstract As web has become the most popular media to attract users and customers worldwide, webpage aesthetics plays an increasingly important role for engaging users online and impacting their user experience. We present a novel method using deep learning to automatically compute and quantify webpage aesthetics. Our deep neural network, named as Webthetics, which is trained from the collected user rating data, can extract representative features from raw webpages and quantify their aesthetics. To improve the model performance, we propose to transfer the knowledge from image style recognition task into our network. We have validated that our method significantly outperforms previous method using hand-crafted features such as colorfulness and complexity. These promising results indicate that our method can serve as an effective and efficient means for providing objective aesthetics evaluation during the design process.

How homepage aesthetic design influences users’ satisfaction: Evidence from China

In the product emotional design era, the website homepage design, especially the aesthetic design, has become a key factor that influences users’ first impressions, attitudes and behaviors. Based on the Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) theory, the current study examines the mechanism through which the aesthetic design of a comprehensive job-hunting website homepage affects users’ satisfaction. Emotion and perceived ease of use were used to describe users’ internal evaluation to the homepage (i.e. organism). The Structural Equation Modeling method was used to test the proposed hypotheses. The empirical evidence shows that aesthetic formality does not have a significant impact on positive arousal, but it has positively influences on energetic arousal through its impact on aesthetic appeal. The other hypotheses proposed in this study are all been supported. The additional results, i.e. the effects of three key design elements on homepage aesthetics, are found. The aim of this study was to provide practical recommendation in the establishment of a pattern of webpage aesthetics that influences users’ satisfaction.

Webpage aesthetics, performance and usability: Design variables and their effects

The primary objectives of this research are to identify the underlying clusters of design variables affecting the perceived usability of a webpage and to examine the effects of webpage design variables on webpage performance. Fifty-seven design variables and 10 underlying clusters that conceptualise the structure of user webpage judgement are identified through content analysis on literature and structured interviews, balanced incomplete block user survey administration and cluster analysis. Five clusters are selected to conduct three experiments that quantify the change in user aesthetic preference, perceived ease of interaction and interaction speed as a function of loading speed, image colour, image size, font size, link style, and column width. Results show that user performance alone is not a good indicator of aesthetic judgement and overall effectiveness of a webpage. The value of integrating global construct analysis processes and local controlled experimentation processes in ergonomic interface research is illustrated. Fifty-seven webpage design variables are defined, ranked and clustered according to perceived importance and overall preference. Experimental results illustrate that both technical performance and aesthetic factors are important webpage design considerations.