Can a computer tell you if a webpage is ugly?

This is a little something I’ve been experimenting with in my spare time, and it’s a fun problem. Partly because the answer should be “not in a million years”.

Here’s a colour analysis on one of our own webpages: Nibbler.

On the left is the perceived colour palette, i.e. the colours people notice. This is similar to the most commonly used colours, but with consideration for edges, gradients and other tricks of human perception. For now, you might think of it as ‘magic’.

Now compare this with two other websites, first Apple. Notice how few colours Apple use, and how consistently they are applied:

And the self-proclaimed Worst-Website-In-The-World, which is a little less restrained:

Even by only looking at the perceived palette (i.e. no understanding of the page itself), certain patterns emerge:

• Tasteful designs tend to have a high bias of desaturated colours (greys, muted pastels etc) with infrequent use of stronger colour.
• Hues are usually concentrated around a finite number of bands, and these often compliment.
• A single colour usually dominates (think ‘white space’)
• Messy designs have broader, haphazard palettes. Multiple, highly saturated colours are nearly always hideous.

Of course I’m merely testing against my own tastes here, and this crude analysis has no appreciation of context. Surely, someone could demonstrate a beautiful page that violates all of the above generalisations? Probably.

The next steps should be particularly interesting. I’ll be experimentally extending the analysis to perceive some other design ’standards’:

• Complexity
• Shapes (particularly angular versus curved)
• Uniformity of layout
• Possible partitioning of text / layout / image regions (e.g. “this part is an image and so should be analysis differently”)

Ultimately the results from all of these could be put into a machine learning system, which would ask users to rate on sites, and attempt to ‘learn’ what factors most contribute to predicting their response.

Given that “ugly” and “beautiful” are so subjective, this is likely to score for less subjective criteria, like “tastefulness”,  “warmth” and  “boldness”. Who knows where this might lead. Could a future SiteRay comment on the design of your website?