Development of evaluation method for visual design with multivariate statistical techniques

Abstract

These findings emphasize the need for methodologies and measurement tools that can be used to evaluate the quality of websites visual design. In practice, however, the rapid development cycle of websites usually results in design evaluation being overlooked, while final quality of the design relies only on the web designers' ability and experience. If visual design evaluation is conducted, it usually involves simple comparison of average user ratings on some semantic differential scales. This kind of evaluation, however, does not yield any useful information about possible improvements of the visual design. Furthermore, averaging over participants may introduce methodological flows. The assumption in the simple comparison of averages is that the mean statistic is representative of the whole sample. In real-life scenarios however, people do not always agree about what they like or what they prefer (Meullenet et al., 2007). Two websites, Case Study 2 Case Study 3 Case Study 4 Website genre University Department Hospital websites Hotel websites Web design companies Sample type Prototypes Actual websites Actual websites Actual websites Number of designs 6 15 18 12