Probing a Self-Developed Aesthetics Measurement Application (SDA) in Measuring Aesthetics of Mandarin Learning Web Page Interfaces

This article describes the accurateness of our application namely Self-Developed Aesthetics Measurement Application (SDA) in measuring the aesthetics aspect by comparing the results of our application and users’ perceptions in measuring the aesthetics of the web page interfaces. For this research, the positions of objects, images element and texts element are defined as objects in a web page interface. Mandarin learning web pages are used in this research. These learning web pages comprised of main pages, learning pages and exercise pages, on the first author’s E-portfolio web site. The objects of the web pages were manipulated in order to produce the desired aesthetic values. The six aesthetics related elements used are balance, equilibrium, symmetry, sequence, rhythm, as well as order and complexity. Results from the research showed that the ranking of the aesthetics values of the web page interfaces measured of the users were congruent with the expected perceptions of our designed Mandarin learning web page interfaces (reported also in [18]). Thus, it implies that the subjectivity of aesthetics can be measured in an objective manner. For further understanding on our effort in doing aesthetics measurement, we discussed in details the object modelling used as well as the process in developing this application. We also explained the steps on how to run our application. Additionally, the strength and the weakness of our SDA application shared in this paper suggest that there is still room for the improvement for aesthetics measurement.