International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 – 8887) Volume 77– No.13, September 2013 31 Do Aesthetics Matter in Long-Established Trust? Zahid Hasan Shanto-Mariam University of Creative Technology Uttara, Dhaka, Bangladesh Rathindra Chandra Gope Shanto-Mariam University of creative Technology Uttara, Dhaka, Bangladesh Mohammed Nasir Uddin, Ph,D Jagannath University, Dhaka, Bangladesh ABSTRACT Recently trust has gained momentum in user experience (UX) research due to the rapid development of e-commerce services, privacy and security issues. It is widely considered that the perception of trust is not only influenced by the website attributes (i.e., usability, functionality), but also by other human factors such as aesthetics. However, it is not clear that which factors of aesthetics influence what dimensions of trust while considering aesthetics and trust as multidimensional constructs. In this paper, insights from an experiment conducted with 30 participants on an e-commerce website was presented. Participants' responses on trust, aesthetics and perceived usability and user satisfaction were collected during the experiment. General Terms User Experience, Ecommerce, Human Computer Interaction. Keywords Trust, User Experience, Aesthetics, Usability, User satisfaction. 1. INTRODUCTION As a social being, trust is incorporated into every aspect of human life. At some point in life we have to trust (or distrust) persons, institutions, governments, information, physical things, systems, and more. Its importance spans from individual to social life, from business to technology and even in politics. Without trust social life breaks down, no business transactions take place, new technology is not adopted and even political legitimacy collapses [23]. Researchers do not have a common consensus on what exactly trust is, disagreeing even on basic dimensions. Wang and Emurian [48] identified two main reasons of having multiple dimensions of trust: First, trust is an abstract concept and is often used interchangeably with related concepts such as credibility, reliability, or confidence. Second, trust is a multi- faceted subjective concept that incorporates cognitive, emotional, and behavioral dimensions. Moreover, trust has been studied by different disciplines - sociology, psychology, management, marketing, ergonomics, industrial psychology, electronic commerce (e-commerce)- where it has been defined according to specific disciplinary jargon and conceptualized by own understanding and findings. Although no agreement on defining trust is out there, most researchers acknowledge the importance of trust in human life. Regarding the issues mentioned above, trust is also essential when researching in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Especially when looking beyond traditional" HCI constructs like usability, trust represents an important factor when interacting with technologies. Minocha and colleagues [33], for ex- ample, investigated influencing factors beyond the usability of the website that shape the customer's expectations and experiences. Similarly, Riegelsberger et al. [39] pointed out the importance of trust in HCI. As new technologies are continuously changing the traditional “face to face” buying behavior, designers of such systems now have more responsibilities for supporting trust and trustworthy actions. In the presented experiment we studied trust from an e commerce perspective since e-commerce systems involve high risk, which is a prerequisite for trust [28]. In this study, “trust in e-commerce" was considered as a multidimensional concept consisting of honesty, benevolence and competence ([11][36][15]). In particular, trust is a relevant component of user experience, supporting a positive experience when interacting with a system. Empirical studies on trust show that there is a clear link between trust and the perception of instrumental qualities of the system (i.e., ease-of-use, performance, privacy and security) (e.g., [11][22][43]). Only a few studies were conducted to investigate the relationship between trust and non-instrumental qualities such as aesthetics (e.g., [12][8][41]). Further, the relation between trust and emotion is still inconclusive and sometimes contradictory ([35][9]). While most of the previous research investigated these relationships by forming trust on some new entities (e.g., fictitious online store), we investigated these relationships with participants already having trust established on e-commerce website. The paper is organized as follows. First, related work on trust is presented. Second, a detailed description of the conducted experiment is given. Third, the results of our study are introduced and finally, conclusions with indications for further research are discussed. 2. RELATED WORK When designing interactive systems, trust has become a key concern for researchers in HCI. If people do not trust new technology, products or services, along-term usage and adoption is difficult to establish. In this section we discuss the nature of trust and its relevance for HCI. 2.1 Trust and Trust Concepts Trust has been investigated in many different fields. Psychologists, for example, consider trust as an important element for personality development. Philosophers define trust in terms of social values and benefits. In management, trust is related to organizational benefit. It is widely believed that trust can increase business productivity. Researchers from marketing field often define trust within buyer-seller relationship, branding and services (see detailed overview in [48]). After reviewing the concepts of trust in various disciplines, Wang and Emurian [48] distinguished four common characteristics of trust a) Trustor and trustee (two parties must be involved), b) Vulnerability (uncertainty and risky environment), c) Produced actions (there should be some