TY - GEN
T1 - What is beautiful is useful: visual appeal and expected information quality
AU - van der Geest, Thea
AU - van Dongelen, Raymond
PY - 2009/7/19
Y1 - 2009/7/19
N2 - Would users, when having a first glance on websites, expect that visually appealing websites contain better information than websites that are less appealing? And if they looked longer, would that change their judgment? We created two versions for 12 homepages of websites, one with low visual appeal, the other one with high visual appeal. Through a pre-test, we made sure we entered the main study with validated ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’ sites. In the main study, 588 participants asked to judge the expected information quality of the sites for a given task. For 11 of the 12 sites, we demonstrated that a positive judgment of the visual appeal was consistently transferred to a positive expectation of the information quality of the site, after a short exposure time. In a follow-up experiment, a week later, with 355 of the same participants, we proved that also with a longer exposure time the high visual appeal sites were expected to contain better information than the low appeal ones, although the difference between the two versions decreased somewhat. We conclude that visual appeal is an important shortcut for users to determine the information quality of a website.
AB - Would users, when having a first glance on websites, expect that visually appealing websites contain better information than websites that are less appealing? And if they looked longer, would that change their judgment? We created two versions for 12 homepages of websites, one with low visual appeal, the other one with high visual appeal. Through a pre-test, we made sure we entered the main study with validated ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’ sites. In the main study, 588 participants asked to judge the expected information quality of the sites for a given task. For 11 of the 12 sites, we demonstrated that a positive judgment of the visual appeal was consistently transferred to a positive expectation of the information quality of the site, after a short exposure time. In a follow-up experiment, a week later, with 355 of the same participants, we proved that also with a longer exposure time the high visual appeal sites were expected to contain better information than the low appeal ones, although the difference between the two versions decreased somewhat. We conclude that visual appeal is an important shortcut for users to determine the information quality of a website.
KW - IR-101082
KW - METIS-262535
U2 - 10.1109/IPCC.2009.5208678
DO - 10.1109/IPCC.2009.5208678
M3 - Conference contribution
SN - 9781424443581
SP - -
BT - Proceedings of the IPCC 2009 Conference
PB - IEEE
Y2 - 19 July 2009 through 22 July 2009
ER -