Couch: Investigating the Relationship between Aesthetics and Persuasion in a Mobile Application
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Aesthetics, specifically visual appeal, is an important aspect of user experience. It is included as a principle in frameworks such as Fogg's Functional Triad and the Persuasive Systems Design. Yet, literature that directly investigates the influence of aesthetics on persuasion is limited, especially in the context of mobile applications. To understand how aesthetics influences persuasion if it includes the concept of operant conditioning, we designed a mobile app called Couch, which aims to reduce sedentary behaviour. We devised a 2x2 between-subject experiment, creating four versions of the app with two levels of aesthetics and two levels of persuasion (with and without). Measuring persuasion through self-reports, we found that higher levels of persuasion had a significant impact in reducing sedentary behaviour over aesthetics. However, visual appeal had no significant effect on persuasion. We comment on the level of visual appeal of the app and discuss the implications for future work.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it