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Webpage Aesthetics: One Size Doesn't Fit All

Published: 23 October 2016 Publication History

Abstract

Webpages vary drastically in their look and feel: the presence of images is a major discriminating factor. Some webpages contain mainly text; others exploit flashy ads and a variety of eye-catching pictures. In this paper, we investigate the impact of graphics on webpage aesthetics perception and computation. We split webpages in three categories -- small, moderate and high amount of graphics -- and analyzed how different visual features predicted aesthetics for the different categories. Significant between-category differences were found, e.g., the amount of white space decreased aesthetics for the high-graphic webpages, but not for other webpages; more on-page main colors increased aesthetics for the low-graphic webpages, but decreased for the high-graphic webpages. We suggest future research investigates separately webpages with low and high graphic amount. No single improvement recipe may exist for all webpages; a more fruitful strategy would be suggesting different improvements for different types of webpages.

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Cited By

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  • (2024)An interpretable metric of visual aesthetics for GUI designBehaviour & Information Technology10.1080/0144929X.2024.232503044:3(508-522)Online publication date: 29-Feb-2024
  • (2024)The Effects of Webpage Prototypicality, Aesthetics, and Complexity on Eye Fixations and Company PerceptionInformation Systems and Neuroscience10.1007/978-3-031-58396-4_24(271-284)Online publication date: 26-Jul-2024
  • (2023)The effect of prototypicality on webpage aesthetics, usability, and trustworthinessInternational Journal of Human-Computer Studies10.1016/j.ijhcs.2023.103103179(103103)Online publication date: Nov-2023
  • Show More Cited By

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  1. Webpage Aesthetics: One Size Doesn't Fit All

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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    NordiCHI '16: Proceedings of the 9th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction
    October 2016
    1045 pages
    ISBN:9781450347631
    DOI:10.1145/2971485
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 23 October 2016

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    Author Tags

    1. Computational aesthetics
    2. document and image aesthetics
    3. graphical user interfaces
    4. quantitative methods

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    • Research-article
    • Research
    • Refereed limited

    Funding Sources

    • The Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research

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    NordiCHI '16

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    NordiCHI '16 Paper Acceptance Rate 58 of 231 submissions, 25%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 379 of 1,572 submissions, 24%

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    Cited By

    View all
    • (2024)An interpretable metric of visual aesthetics for GUI designBehaviour & Information Technology10.1080/0144929X.2024.232503044:3(508-522)Online publication date: 29-Feb-2024
    • (2024)The Effects of Webpage Prototypicality, Aesthetics, and Complexity on Eye Fixations and Company PerceptionInformation Systems and Neuroscience10.1007/978-3-031-58396-4_24(271-284)Online publication date: 26-Jul-2024
    • (2023)The effect of prototypicality on webpage aesthetics, usability, and trustworthinessInternational Journal of Human-Computer Studies10.1016/j.ijhcs.2023.103103179(103103)Online publication date: Nov-2023
    • (2020)Relationship Between Visual Complexity and Aesthetics of WebpagesProceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3313831.3376602(1-13)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2020
    • (2018)Exploration of the Relationship between UIDL and Interface Computational AestheticsProceedings of the 2018 ACM Companion International Conference on Interactive Surfaces and Spaces10.1145/3280295.3281749(47-51)Online publication date: 19-Nov-2018

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