A novel webpage layout aesthetic evaluation model for quantifying webpage layout design

Abstract It is widely accepted that webpage layout is important for website aesthetics. However, knowledge is limited about which kind of webpage layout is aesthetic. In this paper, we conduct a large-scale analysis of 13,017 real webpages with different aesthetic levels. The results demonstrate that there are significant differences between aesthetic webpages and non-aesthetic webpages in several aspects of layout design, such as the position of objects and the average number of objects. In order to identify whether the web layout is aesthetic, we propose a novel Webpage Layout Aesthetic Evaluation model (WLAE) based on an improved Adaboost algorithm to automatically predict the aesthetics of a webpage layout. Experimental results show that our WLAE model is significantly better than other existing methods. Based on the feature analysis of 13,017 real-world webpages and the contribution of each feature to webpage aesthetic prediction, we have summarized 4 webpage design principles for webpage designers. Besides, a large number of real webpages collected by our team can be used for further research on webpage layout aesthetic design and/or related research.