Dr. David Robins, Assistant Professor in IA and IU and  Dr. Jason Holmes, Assistant Professor in Library and Information Science are presenting their research Tuesday, 8:30am at the Annual Conference for the American Society for Information Science and Technology in Milwaukee, WI.  Their brief program abstract is below.

Regardless of the quality or credibility of content, a poorly designed or aesthetically unappealing web page will likely produce a negative impression of credibility. This study compared credibility judgments for websites in which the visual design had been varied. A factor analysis showed patterns of higher credibility scores for higher visual design treatments. The importance of the findings presented here are that visual design has impact beyond decoration. It is a common (if latent) assumption that all serious web sites wish to be perceived as credible, believable, and trustworthy, especially in an authorless environment.