Are you making an impression? : The visual aesthetics of career websites

Abstract: The field of HCI has begun to realize the importance of visual aesthetics. Recent studies have investigated visual aesthetics related to first impressions and found that judgments can be made almost instantaneously. This thesis builds upon previous research related to visual aesthetics and first impressions. Two different approaches were used to investigate university student’s subjective impressions of career websites of organizations. The first approach investigated first impressions, were users rated the websites on their visual appeal, after viewing a screenshot of the website for only 500 milliseconds. In the second approach, the viewing time was not restricted, and the users rated the screenshots on four statements of the VisAWI-S questionnaire. The subjective ratings collected in the two studies were compared objective characteristics such as number of images, number of visual objects and the average RGB-value of the screenshots. Strong correlations was found between the subjective ratings given in the two studies. Both methods was found useful for evaluating the visual aesthetics of websites, and the context of the study should also guide the choice of method. No correlations were found between the objective characteristics and the subjective ratings, with the exception to the average RGB-values. There was an indication that the students preferred websites with darker colors.