1 Introduction

The success of Apple products is of no surprise to anyone (Brosch et al. 2010). The company has established their reputation of having aesthetically designed products. This beauty has been associated with a strong emotional desire from consumers that results in an increased desire to own them (Norman 2005). Aesthetics is a major dimension when designing products. Aesthetics is however a broad term and has been explored with different focuses. All these definitions have an underlying common dimension of beauty embedded in them (Kant 2000).

Concept of aesthetically designed IT products has been used for websites in the past (Lynch 2009; Papachristos and Avouris 2011; Van der Heijden 2003). It was observed the aesthetics and design in general can impact an array of factors affecting user’s attitudes towards website. Broadly speaking, the concept of usability has been the most popular when measuring user’s response to product like websites and other IT products (Nielsen 1994). However this phenomenon has not been explored in case of mobile applications. Some research has found evidence that is similar to websites, mobile applications designed with aesthetic parameters in consideration impact the quality perception of the applications (Bhandari et al. 2015).

Specifically aesthetics has been looked at frequently to understand and open the black box of how users form judgments towards IT products. Multiple scales have been created to measures aesthetic for websites. Lavie and Tractinsky (2004) has developed the perceived visual aesthetic scale that sub classifies aesthetics into classic and expressive aesthetics which can be used to evaluate whether websites have followed a particular aesthetic bent (Lavie and Tractinsky 2004). Despite of having the understanding of the importance of aesthetics, efforts in this direction has been limited to only defining what design means resulting in major gaps. First, these studies did not test the dimensions of aesthetics with real world products to examine the reaction of the users.

Second, it is still unclear why these aesthesis dimensions have an impact on how we process information specifically design processing mechanism. Does it appeal to certain cognitive or affective dimension that drives the subsequent behavior and judgments? This is an important question to answer if we want to move towards a more customize experience for users.

Self-report measures have been used to have retrospective measures of factors like attractiveness, intention to use, attitude which are central to user’s reacting to IT products. A major criticism of transitional psychometric measures is self-reporting which might be far from real time evaluations. In this vein, researchers are now looking at supplement traditional psychometric measures with more objective measures for e.g. physiological measures which can help in measuring constructs like emotions, attractiveness, attention, cognitive engagement etc. This can further strengthen the confidence of refreshers and practitioners in phenomenon under focus.

Keeping these gaps in mind this study addresses above-mentioned issues. First of all we manipulate design factors specifically to see their effect on cognitive processing of design and subsequent effect on attitude towards applications. Also we uncover the black box of design processing on the context of mobile applications. Finally we use combination of subjective and objective measures for measuring the processing mechanism.

2 Theoretical Background

Achieving harmony is in important design principle to achieving greater usability (Dilman 2005). The word harmony is often interchangeable by the word unity. They are being referred to as a complete concord among the elements in a design. For instance, they appear as though they were being brought together through some visual connection, thus, giving them a sense of belonging together (Lauer and Pentak 2011). Therefore, we propose that unity in designing mobile applications can be achieved through balance and visual complexity.

2.1 Design Factor-Balance

According to Lauer, balance refers to the allocation of visual weight within a screen. In accessing pictorial balance (screen on the mobile app), an individual would expect to see some form of equal distribution on both sides using the center vertical axis as a separator. Using a seesaw as an example, the vertical axis would act as the fulcrum and the two sides will need to be in equilibrium. When equilibrium is not achieved, an individual will feel that something is just not right. The individual will feel that there is a need to rearrange the elements on the screen. According to Lauer, Balance can be achieved through multiple ways (Lauer and Pentak 2011).

First, it could be achieved through bilateral symmetry. Bilateral symmetry could be applied by repeating similar shapes on the exact positions on both axes. It is also commonly known as formal balance (Lauer and Pentak 2011). This is inline with the law of similarity in the Gestalt theory (Fisher and Smith-Garatto 1998–1999). In this law, individuals will be attracted to it by grouping the similar objects together. Individuals will be able to recognize them because they look similar in the same arrangement (Fultz 1999).

Second, balance can also be attained through value. Value is determined by the amount of contrast, which describes the lightness, or darkness of the hue. For instance, black gives a powerful contrast than grey against white. The addition of ‘white’ color creates a tint, which increases the value of the color. On the other hand, the addition of ‘black’ produces a shade which lowers the value of the color (Lauer and Pentak 2011). Hence, choosing a dark color against a light color commonly does this, as it would attract the individual’s attention.

Last but not least, balance could also be achieved through color. It is commonly used to create the focal point of the picture. For instance, individual will be attracted to brighter colors such as yellow as compared to darker colors like grey or black. Hue is one of the properties of color. It simply refers to the name of the color that is red, orange, green or purple that could be mixed to produce other colors such as pink or red. According to Lauer, “hue describes the visual sensation of the different parts of the color spectrum” (Lauer and Pentak 2011).

2.2 Design Factor-Complexity

Geissler et al.’s (2001) in his study found that visual complexity has the notion of how many elements occupy the design space. This density can further impact how users react to the design in terms of first impressions. Similar to Heissler’s results other studies have also found complexity to majorly impact user judgments. Findings regarding the influence of amount of text, number of links, and number of graphics on user’s perceived complexity of webpage have been found (Deng and Poole 2005).

Other way of understanding this is in terms of the output of variations in visual complexity. Studies found that by manipulating complexity it can impact aesthetic processing, fluency processing and other derivatives (Reber et al. 2004).

When varying the amount of information in the stimuli increases complexity it will require higher amount of cognitive resources for aiding information processing. This can result in users developing liking towards certain stimuli and impact usability parameters like attention.

3 Hypothesis Development

According to Lauer (Lauer and Pentak 2011), symmetry could be achieved through a balance of color or value. An interface that is designed with high symmetry consists of text and images that are aligned along either of the axis. This alignment could be achieved through the usage of colors. On the other hand, an interface that is designed with low symmetry will not have equally aligned text and images. This will cause the user to feel that something is just not right which results in a reduced attention span. Therefore, the individual will feel that there is a need to rearrange the elements on the screen for a better cognitive processing of information on the interface.

H1 (a) Higher balance will negatively affect the cognitive load associated with mobile applications.

H1 (b) Increased balance will positively affect the attention associated with mobile applications.

While balance deals primarily with alignment and grouping of information, complexity deals with amount of information. Higher complexity is achieved by having higher density of interface elements. When user is exposed to highly complex information, it increases the cognitive resources required to process the information. This leads to a higher cognitive load.

H2 (a) Higher complexity will positively affect the cognitive load associated with mobile applications

On the other perspective, it can also lead to increased attention. However the subsequent user judgment of this effect may not be positive. Heightened attention can often result in disliking if it is accompanied by increase in cognitive load. This we hypothesize:

H2 (b) Higher complexity will positively affect the attention associated with mobile Higher

Information processing perspective, more information is more resources needed.

Usability has been at the centre of a number of studies but they have different focuses ranging from satisfaction to visual appeal to trust etc. Studies have linked usability with cognitive processing of design elements (Van der Heijden 2003) and also the affective component of initial impressions. In this study we look at the cognitive aspect of design only. When the individual has to encounter an interface that requires a high cognitive load, the individual will have to spend more time processing the information on the screen, which results in a lower satisfaction. Therefore, we hypothesize,

H3: Higher cognitive load will negatively affect the attitude towards mobile applications

An individual is often attracted to an interface with higher degree of balance and a lower complexity. Such attraction will increase the individual’s satisfaction towards the application and user will be more willing to use mobile application. Therefore, we hypothesize,

H4: Higher attention will positively affect the attitude towards mobile applications.

4 Research Methodology and Data Analysis

The main objective of this study is to find how aesthetic based design attributes impact the cognitive dimension and attention parameters of design processing. We thus manipulate balance and complexity to induce high and low levels of balance and complexity. Within subject experiments are designed and exposing participants to the manipulated stimuli can collect data. The analyses involved preprocessing of neurophysiological data to get objective measurements for cognitive load and attention. This can be used to run repeated measures ANOVA to find within subject and between subject differences.

4.1 Stimuli

In this study we choose to study 6 applications that have been ranked under Top 30 applications in the iTunes applications store. The reason is because we want to explore what works with top performing applications with regards to design. These applications are chosen to have high or low complexity (text), high/low complexity (images) and high/low (balance). We hence operationalized two independent variables: complexity and balance. For low balance interfaces, text and images are not aligned along either of the axis. Mirroring of visual composition is not done in these designs to achieve difficulty in information processing. Balance makes it easier for us to process the information and thus a low balance interface needs to have lack of alignment across horizontal or vertical axis. For complexity, manipulations can be done for image and text both. Limiting the number of images and textual space can offer clean manipulations for complexity. We designed two levels of complexity (complexity increases from low to high) in the stimuli by manipulating numbers if links, graphics and text.

4.2 Eye Tracking

Part of the problem with using just subjective measures is common method bias and also ambiguity in measurement and complex interpretations. Physiological measurements are used less in measuring first impressions and don’t suffer from being overshadowed by extreme retrospective processing in self-reported measures. Measuring the physiological changes of users enables assessing their reaction to the experienced applications. Research suggests that physiological tools can be effectively used to measure reaction to design base interfaces (Strebe 2011). Popular techniques include using screen saving, facial and eye movement tracking. We use eye tracking as it can measure unbiased and immediate reaction as the stimulus presents itself. The users have little control over their physiological reaction to the stimuli and it can capture even before they actively start analyzing the design. Another advantage if eye tracking is that we can do area of interest analysis. We divide the stimuli into various areas and these can be compared across the board with other stimuli.

We measure cognitive demand objectively by pupil dilation as our first dependent variable (Palinko et al. 2010). Fixations and saccades are recorded to measure attention. Fixation count and saccades are an important physiological measure for understanding how users are processing the design and thus can be used to measure attention, which is our second dependent variable. The important thing to note is that we restrict the amount of time the stimuli shows in order to restrict over processing. What we are capturing is the instant first impression reaction of users. We aim to add understanding of how design factors affect design processing amongst users. Also practically for mobile application designers this study can guide them on important design considerations to bear in mind while designing their applications (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1.
figure 1

Schematic diagram of the research model

Full size image

5 Conclusion

Smartphone users across the globe are using their devices to do all kind of tasks. From online shopping to personal entertainment to travel based tasks. They achieve these using special programs called mobile applications or popularly known as “applications”. In such a scenario it has become more than ever critical to understand what “clicks” with users from design perspective. Usability perspective has long helped solve this problem. However a new issue is emerging where users have multiple options for smart phone application. A common scenario is when users are overloaded with choices and possess only restricted information to make this decision. Design can be crucial in such cases and the main factor driving the purchase or in this case download decision. User often has to make a choice whether to download this app or not. This decision in such a case can be dependent on design mostly. This is because it is the only thing that users get exposed to at this stage. Information processing based perspective can offer insight to this problem with a special focus on design information.