My Master's capstone project, "Looking Good on the Web: Evaluating the Visual Impact of Political Websites" is well underway. I was recently accepted to participate in the student research competition at the Computer-Human Interaction international conference in Florence, Italy (April 2008). My work aims at capturing the immediate perception we have as individuals when we first visit a website. For the experiment, 339 websites of congressional officeholders were examined for their perceived visual favorability. Beyond an increased understanding of general politics online, my work suggests a set of design heuristics to follow which will be perceived favorably by website visitors at first glance. More information will be posted in the coming weeks...

© 2008 Nina Perry