Computational Model of Aesthetics for Improved Interface Design

Good interface design requires knowledge about people: how they see, understand and think. Another important aspect of good design is how information is visually presented to the user or the aesthetics of the interface. Aesthetically pleasing interfaces improve usability, which implies the improvement in productivity. An interface is composed of the rectangular webpage objects which contain image, text. The positions of these rectangles in the webpage have a direct relation with the aesthetics. Again, the features associated with the text and image affect interface aesthetics.

The specific objectives of our work are
• Design of computational models for aesthetics prediction of webpage elements: text, image
• Design of computational model for aesthetics prediction based on the positions (geometric property) of webpage elements in the layout.
• Design of computational model for aesthetics prediction of a whole webpage by combining the previous two objectives.
• Use of model for design of aesthetically pleasing webpages.

Figure 2 shows an example of IIT Guwahati webpage and its wireframe model, text component and image component. Till date, we developed a computational model for wireframe structure. We also developed a model for images present in an interface. Lastly we developed a computational model for text elements. Currently we are working on integrating these three models to develop a computational model for whole interface.