Beauty and Color in Human-Computer Interaction: An Implicit Measurement

This study aimed to find out whether the Stroop Priming Task could be a suitable alternative to explicit methods for measuring first impression beauty judgments of website users, as well as to shed more light on the relationships between color, visual complexity, prototypicality and the judged beauty of websites. The conducted Stroop Priming Task contained target words semantically related to beauty, neutrality and ugliness, and screenshots of website homepages, varying in visual complexity, prototypicality and color, as priming stimuli. Results indicate that the used Stroop Priming Task was not able to accurately measure the judged beauty of websites in website users’ first impressions. Also, the results indicate that the absence or presence of color in websites does not significantly influence the first impression beauty judgments of website users. Possible explanations are discussed, and further research is proposed.