An exploration of relations between visual appeal, trustworthiness and perceived usability of homepages

Abstract

Extremely high correlations between repeated judgments of visual appeal of homepages shown for 50 milliseconds have been interpreted as evidence for a mere exposure effect [Lindgaard et al. 2006]. Continuing that work, the present research had two objectives. First, it investigated the relationship between judgments differing in cognitive demands. Second, it began to identify specific visual attributes that appear to contribute to different judgments. Three experiments are reported. All used the stimuli and viewing time as before. Using a paradigm known to disrupt processing beyond the stimulus offset, Experiment 1 was designed to ensure that the previous findings could not be attributed to such continued processing. Adopting a within-subject design, Experiment 2 investigated the extent to which judgments differing in cognitive demands (visual appeal, perceived usability, trustworthiness) may be driven by the visual characteristics of a Web page. It also enabled analyses of visual attributes that contributed most to the different judgments. Experiment 3 replicated Experiment 2 but using a between-subject design to ensure that no practice effect could occur. The results suggest that all three types of judgments are largely driven by visual appeal, but that cognitively demanding judgments are processed in a qualitatively different manner than visual appeal, and that they rely on somewhat different visual attributes. A model accounting for the results is provided.