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We investigated whether design experts or laypersons evaluate webpages differently. Twenty participants, 10 experts and 10 laypersons, judged the aesthetic value of a webpage in an EEG-experiment. Screenshots of 150 webpages, judged as aesthetic or as unaesthetic by another 136 participants, served as stimulus material. Behaviorally, experts and laypersons evaluated unaesthetic webpages similarly, but they differed in their evaluation of aesthetic ones: experts evaluated aesthetic webpages as unaesthetic more often than laypersons did. The ERP-data show main effects of level of expertise and of aesthetic value only. There was no interaction of expertise and aesthetics. In a time-window of 110–130 ms after stimulus onset, aesthetic webpages elicited a more negative EEG-amplitude than unaesthetic webpages. In the same time window, experts had more negative EEG-amplitudes than laypersons. This patterning of results continued until a time window of 600–800 ms in which group and aesthetic differences diminished. An interaction of perceiver characteristics and object properties that several interactionist theories postulate was absent in the EEG-data. Experts seem to process the stimuli in a more thorough manner than laypersons. The early activation differences between aesthetic and unaesthetic webpages is in contrast with some theories of aesthetic processing and has not been reported before.
Usability is a core construct of website evaluation and inherently defined as interactive. Yet, when analysing first impressions of websites, expected usability, i.e., before use, is of interest. Here we investigate to what extend ratings of expected usability are related to (a) experienced usability, i.e., ratings after use, and (b) objective usability measures, i.e., task performance. Furthermore, we try to elucidate how ratings of expected usability are correlated to aesthetic judgments. In an experiment, 57 participants submitted expected usability ratings after the presentation of website screenshots in three viewing-time conditions (50, 500, and 10,000 ms) and after an interactive task (experienced usability). Additionally, objective usability measures (task completion and duration) and subjective aesthetics evaluations were recorded for each website. The results at both the group and individual level show that expected usability ratings are not significantly related either to experienced usability or objective usability measures. Instead, they are highly correlated with aesthetics ratings. Taken together, our results highlight the need for interaction in empirical website usability testing, even when exploring very early usability impressions. In our study, user ratings of expected usability were no valid proxy neither for objective usability nor for experienced website usability.