Impact of website visual design on user experience and website evaluation: the sequential mediating roles of usability and pleasure

In this study, we investigate how website visual design affects users' experience, then their subsequent attitudinal and behavioural outcomes towards the website. We investigate the roles of usability and pleasure, two important constructs of user experience, and propose a three-path sequential mediation model. We test the model with experiments in which we assign web users with varied levels of website visual design in two studies, one with a fictional website and the other with comparable webpages from real e-commerce websites. In both experiments, we find a consistent positive effect of website visual design on website evaluation variables through a sequential mediation of usability and pleasure. An alternative reversed mediation model in which pleasure precedes usability is also tested but found to be unsupported.