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Are First Impressions about Websites Only Related to Visual Appeal?

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This paper investigates whether immediate impression about websites influences only perceptions of attractiveness. The evaluative constructs of perceived usability, credibility and novelty were investigated alongside visual appeal in an experimental setting in which users evaluated 20 website screenshots in two phases. The websites were rated by the participants after viewing time of 500 ms in the first phase and with no time limit in the second. Withinwebsite and within-rater consistency were examined in order to determine whether extremely short time period are enough to quickly form stable opinions about high level evaluative constructs besides visual appeal. We confirmed that quick and stable visual appeal judgments were made without the need of elaborate investigations and found evidence that this is also true for novelty. Usability and credibility judgments were found less consistent but nonetheless noteworthy.
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P. Campos et al. (Eds.): INTERACT 2011, Part I, LNCS 6946, pp. 489–496, 2011.
© IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2011
Are First Impressions about Websites Only Related
to Visual Appeal?
Eleftherios Papachristos and Nikolaos Avouris
Human-Computer Interaction Group, Electrical and Computer Eng. Dept.,
University of Patras, GR-265 00 Rio Patras, Greece
{epap,avouris}@ece.upatras.gr
Abstract. This paper investigates whether immediate impression about web-
sites influences only perceptions of attractiveness. The evaluative constructs of
perceived usability, credibility and novelty were investigated alongside visual
appeal in an experimental setting in which users evaluated 20 website screen-
shots in two phases. The websites were rated by the participants after viewing
time of 500 ms in the first phase and with no time limit in the second. Within-
website and within-rater consistency were examined in order to determine
whether extremely short time period are enough to quickly form stable opinions
about high level evaluative constructs besides visual appeal. We confirmed that
quick and stable visual appeal judgments were made without the need of
elaborate investigations and found evidence that this is also true for novelty.
Usability and credibility judgments were found less consistent but nonetheless
noteworthy.
Keywords: Webpage design, aesthetic evaluation, credibility, visual appeal,
perceived usability.
1 Introduction
The importance of appropriate aesthetic web design has been clearly shown by Lind-
gaard et al. [1] in a series of experiments about the immediacy of first impressions.
Their findings indicate that first impressions about websites can be formed during the
initial 50 ms of viewing and that they are highly stable over time. In a subsequent
study Tractinsky et al. [2] replicated and extended the above study providing further
evidence for the immediacy and consistency of aesthetic impressions.
These results had quite an impact on the HCI community because they suggested
an elevated importance for website aesthetics. However, there is an ongoing debate
about the nature of such aesthetic responses regarding the involvement of cognition.
According to Norman [3] the visceral response to visual stimuli is merely an affective
unconscious reaction about good or bad: a “gut” feeling. Hassenzahl [4] rejects the
notion of visceral beauty stating that beauty judgments are “cognitive elaborations of
the initial diffuse reaction” to stimuli. In that vein of thought cognition is required for
aesthetic judgment. Additionally, that initial reaction may serve as a starting point for
subsequent, more complex evaluation which often involves expectation and prior
490 E. Papachristos and N. Avouris
experience. However, Lindgaard’s et al. [1] and Tractinsky’s et al. [2] results contra-
dict to some extend the above by showing that their subjects could provide stable
aesthetic evaluations in time periods too short to discern all of the stimuli details.
If first impressions are only positive or negative feelings about stimuli as Norman
[3] and Hassenzahl [4] presume, then users wouldn’t be able to distinguish between a
set of high-level evaluative constructs. Any judgment would be a “halo effect” or a
carry-over effect of that positive or negative impression to the other construct and
evaluations should be highly correlated and not independent. If however, website
users have predisposed concepts such as simplicity, symmetry and familiarity associ-
ated for example to usability perceptions then it is possible that judgments are a result
of those individual intuitive criteria. If that is true then first impressions are not simple
assessments of positive or negative feelings toward stimuli, but a bundle of quick and
intuitive evaluations of several characteristics which are particularly important to the
individual user.
However, from a designer’s point of view it is important to understand the implica-
tions of website users’ first impressions regardless of the origins of their formation.
Are first impressions only about visual appeal? And if not, what else are users able to
form opinions about in split seconds? In order to investigate if website users are able
to form stable judgment about several website characteristics in a glimpse of an eye
we had first to identify evaluative constructs previously linked to aesthetic matters.
Literature research helped us identify: perceived usability [5,6], perceived credibility
(trustworthiness) [7] and novelty [8,9] as appropriate constructs for the purposes of
our study.
The objectives of this study were:
1. To investigate whether the formation of impressions about other high
level evaluative constructs related to aesthetic design (perceived usability,
credibility and novelty) is as quick as visual appeal, and how stable they
are over time.
2. To examine whether their judgments on the evaluation constructs for the
websites are independent or only covariations with visual appeal.
2 Method
Forty undergraduate university students (25 male, 15 female, aged 21 – 34, mean age =
23.9) participated in the study as partial fulfillment of the requirements in a human
computer interaction course. The participants evaluated screenshots of 20 hotel web-
sites. All participants reported having previous experience with hotel websites in general
but none with the specific sample selected for the study. The selected hotel websites
originated from a remote to the participants destination country (New Zealand) in order
to minimize the possibility of prior sample familiarity. The website selection criteria
were to have a balanced sample of good, average and bad designed websites. Although
the selection process was subjective, post evaluation analysis showed that participants
perceived our sample as balanced according to visual appeal. Unlike the studies
of Lindgaard et al. [1] and Tractinsky et al. [2] we felt that our test material should
belong to the same website domain in order to minimize possible confounding factors.
Are First Impressions about Websites Only Related to Visual Appeal? 491
In addition, we had to reduce stimuli number to avoid participants’ fatigue since they
were asked more questions per website. Similar to Tractinsky et al. [2] we chose to
replicate only the 500 ms condition of Lindgaard’s et al. [1] experiment, which has been
characterized as a time period short enough to form first impressions, but not long
enough to evaluate other features such as semantic content [1][2].
2.1 Procedure
After participants were informed about the purpose of the experiment, specific in-
structions were given about the evaluative constructs (visual appeal, perceived usabil-
ity, credibility and novelty) in order to ensure a unanimous understanding of them.
The evaluation took place on an eye-tracker (Tobii T60) using a specifically devel-
oped software. In the study’s first phase the test websites where displayed as screen-
shots for 500 ms and were followed by a screen that contained the rating scales. We
used an unmarked slider (from 0 to 100) as in [1] with the appropriate description on
each end for each of the aforementioned evaluation criteria. Between each rating
screen and each website screenshot a delay screen lasting for 1sec was placed. The
delay screen contained a crosshair exactly in the middle of the screen in order to en-
sure that all users had the same viewing staring point. The software presented to each
participant the website screenshots in a completely randomized order. There was no
time limit while viewing the evaluation screen.
Fig. 1. Representative website (on the left), rating scales screen (on the right). A delay screen
appeared between websites and ratings scales in each phase.
The second experimental phase was identical to the first one with the difference
that there was no limit in displaying time. In this phase participants were asked to
evaluate the same websites again on the same evaluation criteria after they viewed
each website for as long as they wished. Screenshots were displayed in a new ran-
domized order for each participant. The whole procedure lasted approximately 30
minutes for each participant.
3 Analysis
Since, 40 participants evaluated 20 webpages there was a total of 800 evaluations for
each construct. As a first step of the analysis we examined the frequency distributions of
492 E. Papachristos and N. Avouris
user evaluations for each construct individually. Our concern was to examine whether
user evaluations revealed sample skewness in a particular construct which might limit
result generalizability [2,6]. The examination showed quasi- normal distributions for all
constructs, which means that most evaluations for the entire sample were around the
middle of the scale and fewer at the extremes. In figure 2 mean rating’s for the entire
sample in both phases are displayed, all evaluations were more favorable in the second
phase except visual appeal. However, visual appeal was the only construct with signifi-
cant difference (t(19) = 2.09, p = .05) between the two phases.
Fig. 2. Average evaluation of the entire sample in both phases
In a subsequent analysis we examined our data per website and looked at the corre-
lations of average scores between the two phases for each construct. As it can be seen
in table 1 the lowest correlations are for perceptions of usability (r = 0.64) with only
41.4% of the explained variance shared through the phases. The average ratings for
the other constructs were highly correlated with explained shared variance ranging
from 64.8% to 90.4%. Correlation of novelty perceptions were even higher (r = 0.951,
p < .001) than of visual appeal. All correlations were significant and relatively high,
indicating consistency for user evaluations between very short and long viewing peri-
ods when averaging over stimuli as in [1,2].
As a next step we looked into within-participants consistency by calculating the be-
tween phases correlations of each construct for each participant individually. In both
[1] and [2] this analysis resulted in lower correlations than these aggregated over
stimuli. Within-rater reliability, however, was notably lower in [2] (ranging from -
0.09 to 0.9 with average correlation of 0.55) than in [1]. Our analysis yielded similar
to [2] results indicating large variation in participant consistency (table 2). Participant
reliability in visual appeal ratings ranged from r = .03 to r = .90 with an average of r =
.521. The correlations of 13 participants fell below r = .50 and of 27 above. In total,
70% of the correlations were significant. Participant consistency was somewhat lower
for the other constructs.
Are First Impressions about Websites Only Related to Visual Appeal? 493
Table 1. Correlations of average scores
Correlation Sig.
Visual appeal .864 .001
Per. Usability .644 .002
Credibility .805 .001
Novelty .951 .001
Finally we investigated the between-construct relationship of websites mean rat-
ings for each phase independently. In order for the constructs to have been judged
independently we had to rule out that the evaluations were a result of simple covaria-
tion effects. If attractive websites were evaluated by participants high and the unat-
tractive low on all constructs then the between construct correlation would be high.
The ability of participants to differentiate between constructs, especially at the 500 ms
condition, could indicate that evaluations are not simply a product of a positive or
negative first impression. As depicted in table 3 credibility is positively correlated to
visual appeal and to perceptions of usability in both experimental phases. The influ-
ence of visual appeal on perceived usability (r = .45*) wears off in the second phase
(r = .19) which could indicate that more elaborate investigation is needed by partici-
pants in order to form perceptions of usability.
Table 2. Within participants correlations
Mean Correlation Range Sig. Cor.
V. Appeal
.521 0.03 - 0.90 70%
P. Usability
.261 0.01 - 0.92
22.5%
Credibility
.332 0.03 – 0.83 35%
Novelty
.503 0.10 – 0.90 62.5%
The interesting result, however, is that novelty is significantly negative correlated
to perceived usability and to some extent to credibility, but is positively correlated to
visual appeal (significant only in second phase r=.49). It seems that novelty percep-
tions, which were proven relatively consistent both in within participant and in aver-
age rating, mediate the other evaluations. As shown in [8,9] slightly above average
novelty perceptions are associated with attractiveness, while extreme deviation from
the norms results to confusion and therefore low perceived usability.
These results were a first indication that participants could differentiate at least
novelty perception from a positive or negative first impression that was formed in
split seconds. However average between – construct correlations alone is not enough
to indicate independence of perception. For that reason we examined if particular
websites received differing scores for all or some of the evaluative constructs. For
example, finding some websites rated highly in perceived usability and at the same
time low in visual appeal could indicate that the evaluative constructs were judged
independently from each other.
494 E. Papachristos and N. Avouris
Table 3. Correlations between constructs Phase A and B
Phase A
V. Appeal P. Usability Credibility Novelty
V. Appeal
1 .448
*
.580
**
.284
P. Usability
1 .859
**
-.608
**
Credibility
1 -.395
Novelty
1
Phase B
V. Appeal P. Usability Credibility Novelty
V. Appeal
1 .191 .484
**
.489
*
P. Usability
1 .713
**
-.470
*
Credibility
1 -.250
Novelty
1
For the 500ms condition aggregated over website ratings showed that the seven
most appealing websites were also rated high in perceived usability and credibility but
received only moderate novelty ratings. Six of the seven less appealing websites were
rated low or average on novelty but high in perceived usability. Results from the sec-
ond phase were very similar regarding the above trend, except from some minor
changes in the ranking order of the websites. Although, on average none of the web-
sites scored at the two extremes (largest difference was visual appeal=58.9 and per-
ceived usability = 28.7) we found large divergence of certain constructs in individual
ratings. Averaged over designs constructs scores were used as within subject’s vari-
ables in one way repeated measures ANOVA. The analysis revealed that construct
differences were greater in the 500 ms (F(1,19) = 8.82, p < .008) than in the no time
limit condition (F(1,19) = 5.62, p < .028). Post Hoc comparison showed that novelty
ratings were significantly different from all other constructs in the first phase while
only credibility and visual appeal differed significantly in the second. Although, con-
structs differences seem to vary between the two phases, the aforementioned results
serve as first indicators of construct independence. However, further studies are re-
quired in order to fully understand their relationships.
4 Discussion
The above findings are indications that users form quickly reliable judgments about
various websites characteristics. We found evidence that the formation of novelty
perceptions in split seconds is particularly stable over time. It is certain that partici-
pants used inference and reflection while confronted with the rating scales since no
time limit was imposed. Any kind of experimental setting can’t avoid tempering with
the natural circumstances in which judgments about websites are made. Participants
have to formulate their opinion or give ratings on a scale which interferes with the
natural process in which websites are viewed, judged and used. However judgments
made during extremely short and long exposure shared high explained variance which
means that similar conclusions are made between having only glimpse and after
Are First Impressions about Websites Only Related to Visual Appeal? 495
rigorous examination. In addition the judgments participants were able to make in this
study are very different from simple reactions of liking or disliking.
On the other hand we found considerable differences in participants’ ability to rate
the websites under the experimental conditions. Three of them had no consistent rat-
ing in any of the evaluative constructs, most had only in one or two and only seven
had significant correlations in all of them. The explanation for this could be that cer-
tain participants had strong, predefined notions about some constructs or strong likes
or dislikes about design characteristics easily identified in the 500 ms condition
(color, form, background texture). It is also possible that some participants had the
ability to identify more visual attributes during the same timeframe than others.
The reliabilities concerning credibility and especially perceived usability were no-
ticeably lower. Still the correlations reported aren’t atypical in research in which hu-
man judgment process is involved. Although, we feel that usability judgments are
more moderated by novelty we have to further investigate other alternative visual
factors such us symmetry, complexity and order which have been previously linked
with perceptions of usability
In addition, we confirmed that average visual appeal evaluations of web pages are
very consistent. Furthermore, within participant consistency was considerably lower
than [1] and similar to [2]. An explanation for that could be that Lindgaard [1] used a
polarized sample; half the websites were “ugly” and half “beautiful”. In addition, in
experimental phases 2 and 3 of their study, a subset of the initial sample was used
after keeping only the websites that were rated on the extremes by users in phase 1. In
our and Tractinsky’s [2] studies the sample was indented to be balanced in terms of
attractiveness-beauty by following a quasi - normal distribution. As previously indi-
cated by several studies [10,11] and clearly demonstrated by Tractinsky et al. [2] in
the same context (website evaluation) extreme ratings are more easily generated by
participants. Apparently, participants need more time to evaluate close to average
stimuli since more elaboration is needed to identify flaws or positive characteristics
before forming a final opinion.
5 Conclusion
The present study was able to replicate findings of [1,2] regarding the consistency of
visual appeal evaluations of websites between extremely short and long exposure.
Our aim was to extent previous research and to investigate the consistency of addi-
tional evaluative constructs related to website aesthetics. We found indications that
participants were able to provide stable ratings for novelty and to some extent for
credibility and perceived usability. Our findings support the initial hypothesis that
besides attractiveness other aesthetic responses are also able to be made by website
user in the first critical split seconds of first viewing.
As future work we indent to analyze the eye-tracking data gathered during the ex-
periment in order to examine what participants were able to focus on during the 500
ms period. Also, implicit measures such as response latencies for each evaluative
construct could, as in [2], further validate our results. Finally, we intend to investigate
the relation of low level constructs such us symmetry, order, complexity balance and
contrast to the high level constructs investigated in this study. Such an investigation
496 E. Papachristos and N. Avouris
could help identify which visual attributes have a stronger influence to certain aes-
thetic impressions and which are more stable during time.
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