Objective and Subjective Measures of Visual Aesthetics of Website Interface Design: The Two Sides of the Coin

The main purpose of this study is to compare objective layout-based measures of visual aesthetics with subjective questionnaire-based measures. Correlation analysis was used to carry out the comparison. Values for the tested objective measures were calculated for forty-two web pages already used in a previous study, for which subjective questionnaire scores (classical/expressive and VisA WI) were already available. Results showed significant correlations between many of the tested objective screen layout-based measures and subjective questionnaire-based measures related to order and layout of the screen. These findings suggest that the objective layout-based measures tested in this study can be used for overall assessments of visual aesthetics of websites and particularly for assessing aesthetic aspects related to the classical and the simplicity dimensions of website aesthetics.