Measuring Webpage Visual Aesthetics with Screenshots
摘要
Most research on the first impression of webpage visual aesthetics used screenshots cropped to the top, above-the-fold webpage sections. However, such above-the-fold sections might not fully represent the entirety of webpages, as much design detail is cut off and not shown to participants. We conducted a user study to test if the first impression of aesthetics and complexity differ for above-the-fold and full-page screenshots. The impression of above-the-fold aesthetics partially persisted into the impression of full-page aesthetics, with the two correlating considerably, but not exceedingly strongly. Complexity was a strong predictor of aesthetics for the above-the-fold screenshots, similar to the past research, but not for the full-page screenshots, which is a novel observation. The results suggest that above-the-fold screenshots may be unsuitable for studies of visual aesthetics unless they focus entirely on the immediate first impression of aesthetics.