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Visual complexity and aesthetic perception of web pages

Published: 22 September 2008 Publication History

Abstract

The visual appearance of a Web page influences the way a user will interact with the page. Web page structural elements (such as text, tables, links, and images) and their characteristics (such as colour and size) are used to determine the visual presentation and complexity level of a Web page. We theorise that by understanding a user's visual and aesthetic perception of a Web page we can understand the cognitive effort required for interaction with that page. This paper describes an investigation into user perception of the visual complexity and aesthetic appearance of Web pages. Results show a strong and high correlation between users' perception of visual complexity, structural elements (links, images, words and sections) and aesthetic appearance (organisation, clearness, cleanliness, interestingness and beautifulness) of a Web page. We argue that the results should be used as a further understanding for keeping the balance between aesthetic appearance of a Web page and its visual complexity. Web pages will then be designed that can still be aesthetically attractive but also usable and not overloaded with information for the users.

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cover image ACM Conferences
SIGDOC '08: Proceedings of the 26th annual ACM international conference on Design of communication
September 2008
303 pages
ISBN:9781605580838
DOI:10.1145/1456536
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 22 September 2008

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Author Tags

  1. ViCRAM
  2. aesthetics
  3. visual complexity
  4. visual perception
  5. web design

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  • (2024)Standing out from the crowd: When and why color complexity in social media images increases user engagementInternational Journal of Research in Marketing10.1016/j.ijresmar.2023.08.00741:2(174-193)Online publication date: Jun-2024
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