Analysis of Graphical User Interfaces Aesthetics based on Visual Metrics

Details

Supervisors

Vanderdonckt, Jean ; Zen, Mathieu

Faculty

Louvain School of Management

Degree label

Master [120] en sciences de gestion

Abstract

As the world is evolving at a fast pace, companies need to constantly adapt their strategies to their environment, to stay afloat and competitive on the market. As facing a saturated market, many companies decide to expand overseas using the internet to drive their activity. Doing business online has thus become crucial for many companies nowadays. So, as the trend is being adopted by many businesses around the world, it is fundamental to stand out and design an attractive and intuitive front-end (website), also know as Graphical User Interface (GUI). Many studies have been conducted to determine to what extent a website can be considered as aesthetically pleasing. Besides, although the aesthetics of GUIs remains subjective and hard to measure or quantify, many studies reveal that aesthetics plays a significant role in the success of an online business. So in this thesis, we aim to find a way to measure accurately GUIs aesthetics using as specific dedicated software (i.e. QUESTIM) that computes visual metrics. Therefore, we conducted a comparative study to examine which of GUIs features impacted the most the aesthetics. In short, this study has allowed us to draw significant conclusions, validate, even if sometimes partially, our framework and realize that many factors, as well as other than those highlighted in our study, play a role in predicting the aesthetics.