Impact of website visual design on user experience and website evaluation: the sequential mediating roles of usability and pleasure

ABSTRACT

In this study, we investigate how website visual design affects users’ experience, then their subsequent attitudinal and behavioural outcomes towards the website. We investigate the roles of usability and pleasure, two important constructs of user experience, and propose a three-path sequential mediation model. We test the model with experiments in which we assign web users with varied levels of website visual design in two studies, one with a fictional website and the other with comparable webpages from real e-commerce websites. In both experiments, we find a consistent positive effect of website visual design on website evaluation variables through a sequential mediation of usability and pleasure. An alternative reversed mediation model in which pleasure precedes usability is also tested but found to be unsupported.

KEYWORDS:

• Web user experience
• e-commerce
• visual design
• usability
• pleasure
• mediational model

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In this paper, we choose to use ‘web user experience’ (over other terms such as ‘online customer experience’) because our empirical context focuses on a specific interaction with a website and its related perceptions and evaluations from the perspective of ‘users’ of the website, rather than ‘consumers’ of the firm.

2. For example, Bleier et al. (2019) includes entertainment – defined as ‘the immediate pleasure the experience offers’ (p. 99) – as an affective variable and the informativeness of the webpage as a cognitive variable but they do not integrate website usability, as recommended by Nambisan and Watt (2011).

3. The Aha! Experience – also called the Aha! Moment – refers to ‘the emotional reaction that typically occurs at a moment of sudden insight into a problem or other puzzling issue. It is the experience one would have upon realising, for example, how to fix a computer problem, master a dance step or resolve some other difficulty’, according to the American Psychological Association or APA Dictionary of Psychology (2015).

4. For example, the Norman Nielsen Group distinguishes the overall impression conveyed by visual design as a whole (e.g. the Norman Nielsen Group’s website notes that ‘when looking at a visual, we can usually immediately say whether it is appealing or amiss’. See https://www.nngroup.com/articles/principles-visual-design/) and from the design features and principles (e.g. visual hierarchy, balance, contrast) on which the visual design of the interface is based.

5. Consumer adoption of online travel agencies has grown considerably over the past few years as a global phenomenon (Talwar et al., 2020). In France, e-tourism represented 46% of the total tourism and travel market in 2019, with the market size estimated at EUR 21 billion (Lainé, 2020). In addition, we consider a travel agency website to be relevant because the experience that users obtain through navigating such websites fits the experiential nature of our methodology (e.g. Ye et al., 2019).

6. One expert recommends having more than one typeface for good design systems (i.e. one for body texts, and one for heading).

7. The full serial mediation model is not significant for intention to recommend (Coeff. = –0.0038, 95% CI = −0.0173 to −0.0013) and perceived value (Coeff. = 0.0009, 95% CI = −1.6993 to 1.4270), and is very weak on intention to reuse (Coeff. = −0.009, 95% CI = −0.0305 to −0.0004).

8. E-commerce represents a large portion of the growth in the retail markets in Europe and North America (Centre for Retail Research, 2020). Total e-commerce sales were estimated at USD 791.7 billion for 2020, accounting for 14% of the total retail sales in the United States (US Census Bureau News, 2021).

9. https://www.leifshop.com/pages/about

10. The full serial mediation model is not significant for intention to reuse (coef = .0661, sd = 0.0648, 95% CI = −0.0576 to 0.2013), intention to recommend (coef = 0.0575, sd = 0.0778, 95% CI = −0.0793 to 0.2444) or perceived value (coef = 0.0847, sd = 0.0918, 95% CI = −0.0800 to 0.2965).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eline Jongmans

Eline Jongmans is an Associate Professor of Marketing at Grenoble-Alpes University in France. She conducts research at the Center for Studies and Research Applied to Management (CERAG). Her research on consumer behavior focuses mainly on consumer decision-making and evaluation for products with characteristics that are difficult for consumers to assess. Her research results have been published in refereed journals such as the Journal of Marketing Management and the Journal of Business Research.

Florence Jeannot

Florence Jeannot is an Associate Professor of Marketing at OMNES Education. She graduated from the business school ESCP Europe and obtained her Ph.D at Grenoble-Alpes University in France. Before academia, Florence Jeannot worked as a brand manager at Dassault Systèmes. Her research interests are in the areas of creativity, the adoption of new technologies, and consumer behavior. She has been published in refereed journals such as the Journal of Marketing Management and the Journal of Business Research.

Lan Liang

Lan Liang is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the University of Colorado Denver. Lan’s research investigates consumer perceptions, experiences, and choices on digital platforms. With a focus on Bayesian econometrics, she uses methods from statistics, marketing, and economics to explore the interrelationship among marketing efforts, consumer behavior, and firms’ market performance. She has presented her work at international conferences such as the INFORMS Marketing Science Conference and the World Meeting of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis.

Maud Dampérat

Maud Dampérat is a Full Professor of Marketing at University Lyon 2. She carries out her research at the COACTIS Lab. Her research focuses on the marketing of innovation, particularly on team creativity for innovation, and new product development. She has been published in refereed journals such as the Journal of Business and Industrial Marketing and the Journal of Marketing Management.