Isolating the Effects of Web Page Visual Appearance on the Perceived Credibility of Online News among College Students

Online news sources have transformed civic discourse, and much has been made of their credibility. Although web page credibility has been investigated generally, most work has focused on the credibility of web page content. In this work, we study the isolated appearance of news-like web pages. Specifically, we report on a laboratory experiment involving 31 college students rating the perceived credibility of news-like web pages devoid of meaningful content. These pages contain only "lorem ipsum" text, indistinct videos and images, non-functional links, and various font settings. Our findings show that perceived credibility is indeed affected by some purely presentational factors. Specifically, video presence increased credibility, while large fonts and having no images reduced credibility. Having a few, but not too many, images increased credibility for short articles, especially in the presence of large fonts. We also conducted follow-up interviews, which revealed that participants noticed images, videos, and font sizes when making credibility judgments, corroborating our quantitative experimental results.