Predicting Users' First Impressions of Website Aesthetics with a Quantification of Perceived Visual Complexity and Colorfulness
A computational model of visual complexity and colorfulness for predicting first website impressions.
Citation
Reinecke, K., Yeh, T., Miratrix, L., Mardiko, R., Zhao, Y., Liu, J., & Gajos, K. Z. (2013). Predicting Users' First Impressions of Website Aesthetics with a Quantification of Perceived Visual Complexity and Colorfulness. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '13), 2049–2058.
Method
Online study: 548 volunteers rated 450 websites.
Claims used
- First impressions affect later usability and trust judgments.
- Visual complexity, colorfulness, and demographics explained roughly half the variation in appeal ratings after 500 ms of exposure.
Extracted principles
- First impressions form within 50 msInsufficient evidence
A work index is judged almost instantly; its initial view should convey what the site contains and its quality without requiring interaction.
Visual complexity and colorfulness can be estimated from a screenshot and used to predict first aesthetic impressions.
Project presentation