Aesthetic semantics: Affect rating of atomic visual web aesthetics for use in affective user experience design

Aesthetic principle not only concerns the perception of visual beauty, but most crucially, the cognitive-affective responses derived from experiencing such stimuli. Despite this knowledge, user experience (UX) designers often prioritise beauty over intended end-user affect. This reversed order of prioritisation contradicts the sequential UX design process, leading to unexpected end-user perceptions and responses. The challenge in shaping UX before user interface (UI) design is that there first must be prior knowledge of aesthetic affect. A study with 1,782 worldwide participants was conducted evaluating affective user-responses to 43 atomic aesthetics using 153,252 data points and presented as affect ratings (ARs). Results demonstrated high affective resonance amongst aesthetics evaluated, suggesting aesthetic AR may be a viable method of improving the UX design process by influencing user perceptions, responses and actions at a non-conscious level. This is the first of a series of studies in the direction of aesthetic semantics.