Beauty is more than screen deep: Improving the web survey respondent experience through socially-present and aesthetically-pleasing user interfaces

• Aesthetic quality and social presence of interfaces were successfully manipulated.
• Identified relationships between interface design features and user evaluations.
• ‘Classical’ aesthetics and high social presence contributed to perceived ease of use.

Web surveys are rapidly becoming standard issue in many researchers’ toolkits; however, measurement error has been shown to affect web surveys to a greater extent than paper-and-pencil surveys (Couper, 2000 and Manfreda and Vehovar, 2002). Principles of aesthetic design and social presence have been applied to web surveys to reduce the prevalence of such error with promising results, which were further investigated in this research. A sample of 181 first-year psychology undergraduate students participated in this study. Participants were randomly allocated to view one of eight web survey interfaces, which varied by aesthetic quality and social presence. Exploratory structural equation modeling using the partial least squares method revealed that classical aesthetic quality and social presence were both positively related to perceived ease of use of the web survey interface and positive state affect; social presence and perceived ease of use were positively related to trust in the web survey researcher; classical aesthetic quality was negatively related to negative state affect; and, expressive aesthetic quality was negatively related to perceived ease of use and positively related to positive state affect. Interestingly, expressive aesthetic quality was also positively related to negative state affect. These relationships between aesthetic quality and social presence should inform best practice web survey design recommendations, and future empirical work should extend and test the generalizability of these findings.