Effects of the aesthetic design of icons on app downloads: evidence from an android market

Electron Commer Res (2017) 17:83102

DOI 10.1007/s10660-016-9245-4

Mengyue Wang1 Xin Li1

Published online: 4 October 2016 Springer Science+Business Media New York 2016

Abstract With the rapid development of the mobile app market, understanding the determinants of mobile app success has become vital to researchers and mobile app developers. Extant research on mobile applications primarily focused on the numerical and textual attributes of apps. Minimal attention has been provided to how the visual attributes of apps affect the download behavior of users. Among the features of app appearance, this study focuses on the effects of app icon on demand. With aesthetic product and interface design theories, we analyze icons from three aspects, namely, color, complexity, and symmetry, through image processing. Using a dataset collected from one of the largest Chinese Android websites, we nd that icon appearance inuences the download behavior of users. Particularly, apps with icons featuring higher colorfulness, proper complexity, and slight asymmetry lead to more downloads. These ndings can help developers design their apps.

Keywords Mobile apps Demand Icon Aesthetics Image processing

1 Introduction

A mobile app is a software designed for mobile devices. Nowadays, people routinely interact through their mobile phones. A large market for mobile apps has emerged. Google Play had 1.8 million apps with around 50 billion cumulative downloads in 2013 [55]. App developers and information systems researchers need to understand the factors that make mobile apps successful because of the

& Mengyue Wang [email protected]

1 Department of Information Systems, College of Business, City University of Hong Kong,

Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong

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important role of mobile apps in business and daily life. Previous research has identied several successful app characteristics and marketing strategies [19, 34, 35]. For example, Lee and Raghu [34] examined how the attributes of apps and the strategy of sellers affect the success of apps. Online word of mouth (e-WOM) is recognized as another important factor that affects app sales. Liang et al. [35] categorized user reviews into product quality and service quality and empirically demonstrated that both types of reviews can affect app sales. Existing studies extended...