Spotted: Predicting users' first impressions of website aesthetics with a quantification of perceived visual complexity and colorfulness

Understanding website aesthetics. Impressions formed in half a second, their model, based on complexity, color and user characteristics, captures half the variance in user ratings. Want to know more about how long these impressions last. 

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// published on Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems-Latest Proceeding Volume // visit site

Predicting users' first impressions of website aesthetics with a quantification of perceived visual complexity and colorfulness
Katharina Reinecke, Tom Yeh, Luke Miratrix, Rahmatri Mardiko, Yuechen Zhao, Jenny Liu, Krzysztof Z. Gajos

Users make lasting judgments about a website's appeal within a split second of seeing it for the first time. This first impression is influential enough to later affect their opinions of a site's usability and trustworthiness. In this paper, we demonstrate a means to predict the initial impression of aesthetics based on perceptual models of a website's colorfulness and visual complexity. In an online study, we collected ratings of colorfulness, visual complexity, and visual appeal of a set of 450 websites from 548 volunteers. Based on these data, we developed computational models that accurately measure the perceived visual complexity and colorfulness of website screenshots.