Assessing the Visual Esthetics of User Interfaces: A Ten-Year Systematic Mapping

ABSTRACT

Visual esthetics is recognized as an essential factor of perceived usability, credibility, and overall quality of software systems user interfaces. Thus, it is crucial to assess this factor as part of the development process to improve graphical user interface (GUI) quality. And, although there exist diverse approaches to assess visual esthetics today, they significantly differ in their definition and techniques for measuring it. Therefore, we performed a systematic mapping to provide an overview comparing the existing approaches from the last ten years (2010–2020). We encountered 27 articles reporting different approach types, including assessments measuring user perception of visual esthetics via human responses, metrics based on GUI elements, extracting handcrafted features from GUI screenshots, and deep-learning-based approaches. Most of them implement objective approaches, either using metrics or feature extraction. The majority of the approaches are aimed at web GUIs, with only three focusing on mobile GUIs, considering their smaller screen size, less use of color, and a more vertical element alignment. Few approaches have been comprehensively evaluated regarding reliability and validity. These results indicate the need for further research considering the importance of visual esthetics as part of software quality. The results of this study present an overview and comparison of these approaches from the last decade providing a systematic basis for researchers to better understand the challenges for GUI visual esthetics assessments and the enhancement of these approaches.

Acknowledgments

This study was financed in part by the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico - Brasil (CNPq) - Grant No.: 303674/2019-9.

Notes

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Adriano Luiz de Souza Lima

Adriano Luiz de Souza Lima is a PhD student in Computer Science at Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Brazil. He holds a Master’s Degree in Philosophy and a degree in Information Systems from the same University. His primary research area relates to software engineering, especially HCI and software quality.

Christiane Gresse von Wangenheim

Christiane Gresse von Wangenheimis Professor at Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Brazil. She coordinates the Software Quality Group focusing on scientific research, development and transfer of software engineering models, methods and tools and software engineering education. She coordinates the initiative Computing at Schools that brings computing education to schools.