Does Beauty Matter to Service Consumers? The Influence of Visual Appeal on Self-Service Technology (SST) Acceptance

The visual appeal of self-service interfaces is known to influence consumers' subsequent evaluations of the system's other features and enjoyment; however, the impact of visual appeal on subsequent judgments of system and information quality and hedonic motivation, and consequently on shaping behavioral intentions to use a particular self-service, has not been specifically studied. Therefore, this study examines the impact of visual appeal on the acceptance of self-service technologies using meta-analytic structural equation modeling with 63 independent samples (26,144 cumulative respondents) drawn from 58 empirical studies. As a result, visual appeal demonstrates strong correlations with system quality, information quality, and hedonic motivation and appears to indirectly influence perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, and behavioral intention to use new SST. The findings shed light on the primacy effect of visual appeal on consumers' acceptance of SSTs and the substantive effect of visual appeal in shaping perceptions of system and information quality.