Effects of Color Temperature and Gender on Website Aesthetics

Limited research exists on the hedonic dimensions of HCI and their relevance to usability and an even smaller set of this research is empirical in nature (Hoffman & Krauss, 2004; Schenkman & Jonsson, 2000; Zhang and Li, 2005). Furthermore, it appears that there are gender differences regarding perceptions of attractiveness, usability, and the consequent affective state of satisfaction, in website design. This empirical research aims to address the above gap by studying the effects of color and gender on perceptions of website aesthetics. A 2 x 2 between-subject research design is employed, where color is manipulated in two ways representing the two factors: temperature and scheme. Regarding temperature levels, two pairs of colors are selected from the color wheel, each pair consisting of adjacent hues and categorized as either “warm” or “cool.” Color scheme levels indicate whether a warm color, for instance, is selected as either the primary or secondary color choice for the particular website design. Findings include significant user perceptions of aesthetic website designs when they utilize cool color combinations (here, blue-light blue) as opposed to warm ones (here, red-orange), direct effects of classical aesthetic dimensions (e.g. cleanliness) on expressive aesthetics items (e.g. creativity), and no effects of gender on either set of aesthetics.