The Effect of Age and Information Design on the Perception of Visual Aesthetics

This paper investigates the interplay of information layout, colour temperature (or colour scheme), aesthetics-type and age in the judgment of aesthetics in mobile website design. Having this knowledge will help designers serve users better through personalization. Hence, using the tourism domain as a case study, we conducted an empirical study (n = 323) on the perception of visual aesthetics, using eight versions of a mobile website, comprising two types of layout (grid and list) and four colour schemes (blue, green, orange and red). The results of our Analysis of Variance show that there is a main effect of aesthetics-type and an interaction between layout, colour temperature and age. Users perceive the presented website designs as more classically aesthetic than expressively aesthetic, with younger people being more critical than older people. Moreover, older people tend to be indifferent about the website colour schemes, while younger people tend to prefer moderate-temperature (green and orange) to extreme-temperature (blue and red) grid-style colour schemes. We discuss the implications of our findings for both age groups.