The Determinants and Impacts of Aesthetics in Users’ First Interaction with Websites

Abstract

Though aesthetics is generally acknowledged as an important aspect of website design, extant information systems (IS) research on web user experience has rarely studied what affects website aesthetics and how aesthetics influences users’ perceptions of the website and the organization behind the website. In this paper, we synthesize prior literature from different academic domains and propose users’ perceived quality of five design elements (i.e., unity, complexity, intensity, novelty, and interactivity) as determinants of website aesthetics. We further theorize the effects of aesthetics on users’ attitudes toward the website and their perception of the corporate image. Two studies were conducted to test the research model. In Study 1, we adopted a card sorting method and the results provide substantial support to the determinants of website aesthetics. In Study 2, we conducted a survey using ten company portal websites that were unknown to survey respondents. Our analysis further confirms the effects of users’ perceived quality of the five design elements on the perception of website aesthetics. The findings of Study 2 also show that users’ perception of aesthetics has significant impacts on perceived utility and their attitudes toward the website, which further affects the corporate image exhibited via the website. In addition, we find that in users’ first interaction with a website, perceived aesthetics has a larger impact on their attitudes toward the website than perceived utility.

Key words and phrases:

• corporate image
• design complexity
• design unity
• website aesthetics
• web design
• website intensity
• website interactivity

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the Ministry of Education (MOE) of Singapore (Grant no. T1 251RES1401), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) (Project no. 71471156), and the Shenzhen Research Institute of the City University of Hong Kong for financial support.

Supplemental File

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07421222.2016.1172443

Notes

1. Some prior research has also considered hedonic and utilitarian values as the key determinants of user experience [6, 16]. In general, hedonic value can have different forms in different contexts [16, 35]. We contend that perceived website aesthetics is the primary component of the hedonic value arising from users’ first interaction with a website because it is unlikely for users’ emotional feelings to be influenced by sources other than aesthetic appeal given their limited experience with the website.

2. Landis and Koch [38] propose the following criteria for assessing the magnitude of Cohen’s kappa: = 0 (no agreement); 0.0 to 0.20 (slight agreement); 0.21 to 0.40 (fair agreement); 0.41 to 0.60 (moderate agreement); 0.61 to 0.80 (substantial agreement); and 0.81 to 1.00 (almost perfect agreement).

3. The path coefficients for perceived quality of the five design elements, namely, unity, complexity, intensity, novelty, and interactivity, are 0.15, 0.13, 0.31, 0.34, and 0.16, respectively.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Zhenhui (Jack) Jiang

Zhenhui (Jack) Jiang ([email protected]) is an associate professor in the Department of Information Systems of National University of Singapore and Assistant Dean (graduate studies) in the School of Computing. He received his Ph.D. in management information systems from University of British Columbia. His research interests include social media, electronic commerce, human–computer interaction, and information privacy. His work has been published in top information systems journals, such as MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, and Journal of Management Information Systems, and top human–computer interaction conferences, such as CHI. He has served on the editorial board of MIS Quarterly, IEEE Transactions of Engineering Management, and Journal of the AIS, among others.

Weiquan Wang

Weiquan Wang ([email protected]; corresponding author) is an associate professor in the College of Business at City University of Hong Kong. He received his Ph.D. in Management Information Systems from the University of British Columbia. His research interests include online recommendation agents, human-computer interaction, social media, and online information privacy. His works have been published on Information Systems Research, Journal of Management Information Systems, MIS Quarterly, Journal of the Association for Information Systems, among others. He served as an Associate Editor of MIS Quarterly.

Bernard C.Y. Tan

Bernard C.Y. Tan is Vice Provost at the National University of Singapore (NUS), where he was formerly Head of the Department of Information Systems. He is Shaw Professor of Information Systems at NUS, where he has won university awards for research and for teaching. He was the 15^th President of the Association for Information Systems. He is a Fellow of the Association for Information Systems. He has served on the editorial boards of MIS Quarterly (Senior Editor), Journal of the AIS (Senior Editor), IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management (Department Editor), Management Science (Associate Editor), ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems (Associate Editor), and Journal of Management Information Systems (Editorial Board Member). His research has been published in ACM SIGMIS Database, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, ACM Transactions on Information Systems, ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems, Communications of the ACM, Decision Support Systems, European Journal of Information Systems, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Information and Management, Information Systems Frontiers, Information Systems Research, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, Journal of Global Information Management, Journal of Management Information Systems, Journal of the AIS, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Management Science and MIS Quarterly. His current research interests are social media, virtual communities, and Internet commerce.

Jie Yu

Jie Yu ([email protected]) is a teaching fellow in information systems at the Nottingham University Business School China. He received his Ph.D. in information systems from National University of Singapore. His papers have been published in IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, International Journal of Production Economics, and Expert Systems with Applications.