Do Aesthetics Matter in Long-Established Trust?

Abstract

Recently trust has gained momentum in user experience (UX) research due to the rapid development of e-commerce services, privacy and security issues. It is widely considered that the perception of trust is not only influenced by the website attributes (i.e., usability, functionality), but also by other human factors such as aesthetics. However, it is not clear that which factors of aesthetics influence what dimensions of trust while considering aesthetics and trust as multidimensional constructs. In this paper, we present insights from an experiment conducted with 30 participants on an e-commerce website displayed on an 15 inch display. Participants' responses on trust, aesthetics and perceived usability and user satisfaction were collected during the experiment.