Abstract
In our paper we explore whether user visual perception of web interfaces (WUI) can be predicted by certain quantitative characteristics of WUI screenshots. The considered metrics are JPEG file size, PNG file size, and information entropy value calculated with frequency-based MATLAB’s entropy(I) function. We ran survey with 70 subjects who provided subjective evaluations of complexity, aesthetics and orderliness for 497 website homepages. The results suggest that all the three metrics were significant, and the proposed regression models were considerably better than the respective baseline models that only used the popular JPEG-based metric. Remarkably, the entropy metric had significant positive correlations with aesthetic and orderliness evaluations, but not with the size of the image. We believe our findings might be used in development of automated WUI analysis tools to aid web engineers in their work.
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Acknowledgment
This work was supported by Novosibirsk State Technical University, project No. TP-EI-1_17. We also thank Sebastian Heil from TU Chemnitz (Germany) and Vladimir Khvorostov from NSTU for aiding in the data collection.
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Boychuk, E., Bakaev, M. (2019). Entropy and Compression Based Analysis of Web User Interfaces. In: Bakaev, M., Frasincar, F., Ko, IY. (eds) Web Engineering. ICWE 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11496. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19274-7_19
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19274-7_19
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