- Good morning.
My name is Ziming Wu
from the Hong Kong University
of Science and Technology.
I am going to present the paper
on understanding and modeling
user-perceived brand personality
from mobile application UIs.
This work is done with my collaborators
Taewook Kim,
Quan Li,
and Xiaojuan Ma.
There are thousands of applications coming out
in the market every day,
and users are becoming more and more selective
to download an app from the store.
Why in such competitive environment
designers have no choice but make their
applications stand out from thousands of competitors.
They always try different methods
to make their applications distinct.
Among them,
creating a distinctive brand personality
has turned out to be a very effective strategy.
For example,
when you look at this logo
there could be multiple keywords
immediately coming into your mind.
For example,
passionate, simple, and innovative.
That is possibly the intended message
that designers want to communicate
with the target audience.
So does user interfaces have this effect.
The user interface of mobile applications
define its look and feel,
giving end users an early impression of the
app's detail design.
Such a effect is not only for engaging users
by the appeal,
but also for building competitive advantage
by conveying a consistent brand personality.
In the market research,
brand personality has been defined
as a set of human characteristics
associated to a brand.
And it consists of five dimensions.
Sincerity, excitement, competence,
sophistication, ruggedness.
And existing research has shown that in tests,
brand personality has great impacts on users'
emotional connection,
user satisfaction,
loyalty and trust towards the product.
And moreover, it also shows that
graphical features can be correlated to
the perception of brand personality.
For example,
layout, structure and color themes
can affect the perceived sophistication level
of the brand personality.
And also, the design's dimensions
can lead to the brand excitement.
However, as the brand personality of mobile app
is communicated indirectly through the
look and feel,
a gap may exist
between designers' intention
and users' perception.
For example,
here is an example that designers
intend to build a highly sincere personality UI.
And there's several design alternatives.
But designers have no idea which UI
would users perceive to be the most sincere.
So we aim to understand the design challenges
and the design plan is
to infuse brand personality into the
UI design process.
So we interview with five experts
who are professional UI designers.
They all have more than two years
industrial design experience.
So in this study we try to understand
why they infuse brand personality into the products
when they create,
and how they tailor UI design
to the target brand personality.
And finally,
how they get design feedback
to ensure their intended personality
is properly conveyed.
So regarding the design motivation,
there are two points.
First, as suggested by expert one,
the embodiment of the brand personality
in mobile UI's can help establish
a distinctive brand personality,
promoting the recognizability of the app
amongst similar products.
And the second,
it can help to attract target audience.
Mobile UI's that communicate appropriate personality
can better engage users as studied by expert four.
Second, regarding how they design UI
for a specific personality.
Different experts has shown their
unique way to achieve so,
including manipulating color, font, shape,
organization and et cetera.
But they all comment that there is no
established principles for designing UI personality.
So what they usually do
is they often adopt timely design feedback
to ensure their design properly
conveys the intended information.
Now as the figures show here,
the designers need to frequently elicit
feedback from target audience,
and experts during the interactive app design process.
But it is as they complain,
it is a tedious, time consuming and costly process.
So it highlights the need of low cost,
fast, actionable design feedback.
We explore to put the model in the loop
instead of asking feedbacks from the users.
We use models to compute users' perception
on the mobile app brand personality.
So that designers can attempt
automatic design feedback from the model directly,
without much effort.
So our research question here is that
can we build a computational model to predict
the brand personality of mobile app UI's.
Before that,
we have to figure out whether users can form
consistent brand person --
Consistent perception of brand personality
from mobile app UI's.
If the answers are both yes,
and we would like to further explore
what other visual features there are
that contributes the most to the brand personality.
So the first step we do is to,
of course, to collect data.
We utilize the data of 318 mobile applications
randomly sampled from an existing
public data set.
The apps are mostly downloaded from Google Play.
After presenting the UI images
to the crowd workers on MTurk,
we asked them to rate a UI
regarding the perceived brand personality
using standardized questionnaires.
The 15 personality traits of
Aaker's Brand Personality Dimensions
was rated by the crowd workers.
And they are listed up here.
We also collect the demographic information
from the those crowd workers.
To get more insight of data,
we conduct comprehensive data analysis.
We measure the interclass correlation coefficiency,
which has --
the value is greater than 0.6.
In this case good agreements
among all the users in the radius.
So it answers our search questions.
And yes, users can form consistent perception
of brand personality.
And we further divide the users
into different groups.
For example here,
the scores given by the extroverted users
is significantly higher than
the scores given by the introverted users,
indicating there is a difference among
users with a different personality.
And we found, we also measured the scores
given by the male and females,
but there's no significant difference found.
And we found that the users' preferences
on downloading the app
is correlated with the personality trait.
Except tough trait.
So more details can refer in the paper.
And then we explore to build
a computational model for predicting
the brand personality.
We follow the general pipeline
to build the prediction model.
So in this pipeline we take mobile UI image as input
and we translate those image into
computational features.
With this feature as input
we train the regression model
in our training data set.
After the model is well trained,
it will output the predicted scores
on the testing set.
And we spread the data into 60 percent of training
and the rest for testing.
And to translate a UI image
into the computational features,
we compile a set of expressive
visual descriptors that are
expressive for UI characteristics.
We base on the existing research
and Asterber interviews.
We select three types of features,
color based features,
texture based features,
and organize based feature,
and use different matches to quantify
the three types of feature.
Yeah.
And this the overall performance.
According to the result we can found that
most of the regression models
have higher accuracy than the random guess.
And among them,
the random forest model achieved the lowest errors.
And among the nonlinear model and the linear model,
we found that nonlinear model has better performance.
Which might indicate that
the brand perception of the users
might be now lineally to what the UI features.
And this is the example of the result.
We can found that the scores given by the model
is quite similar to the scores given by
the crowd workers.
So it kind of shows the efficiency of our model.
And to look more into the result,
we found that using the combinations
of the three types of features
can achieve the lowest error.
And when we separate
different types of feature individually
we found that color-based feature
can achieve the highest accuracy,
followed by texture feature
and organization feature.
And among the five brand personality dimensions
sophistication and ruggedness
has the lowest errors.
It is possibly because these two dimensions
are relatively more associated
with symbolic attributes,
which are more subjective
and more difficult to be modeled.
And with further analysis,
the visual feature that contributes the most
to the brand personality of the mobile UI's.
And we li--
we used a Kinney importance analysis
to understand which features contributes the most
in the prediction.
And this lists the top important features
that could be.
And this list of features can give
design implications for designers.
To inform designers which features they should focus
when they want to achieve specific brand personality.
And there are several potential applications
of our model.
First, we can, based on our model
we can design a feedback system
that generate cheap, fast, actionable assessment
of perceived personality.
And it can support automatic UI style transformation.
For example we can transfer visual style
from the main brand to the sub brand
to promote a brand connection in mobile design.
And last but not least,
we can recommend informative, attractive,
and distinctive UI screenshots
to represent and display in the app market
so that it could potentially attract more
potential users.
And for the future work,
since we only involve crowdwor kers from US,
to control the cultural difference,
we might further look into the
users with more diverse background.
And we might look into the text signal
from the user review in the app store.
And might further in the future
deploy this model in the real usage case.
In this paper we present our understanding
and modeling of the brand personality
of the mobile applications.
Which might give design implications
for designers for attempting
automatical design feedback.
Thank you.
I am happy to take any questions.
(applause)
- [Moderator] So thank you, Ziming.
A few questions? We have time.
Oh, no questions?
I have a small question.
- Yeah, sure.
- Now you applied the model on screenshots
of the app store,
but can we also, would it be applicable
to screenshots in other contexts?
For marketing purposes, such as that
marketing folers or companies?
- Sorry, do you mean to model
their brand personality in other contexts?
Do you mean like modeling the brand personality
in other contexts?
- Yes.
- Okay.
Yes, although we focus on mobile UI interface,
these models can also be deployed into other contexts.
For example, the images, the tasks.
But we need to adjust the features we use in our model.
For example, here we use color, organization,
which is expressive of UI characteristics.
But for natural image,
there might be another set of features
that are more representative or expressive.
Or informative.
So we might need to adjust those features
based on the context.
And about the feature importance analysis
in different contexts
of course the result will be different.
- [Moderator] Okay. Thank you.
Are there other questions?
- [James] Hi, James Simpson, University of York.
Very interesting work.
One question I have though is,
I guess modeling is very useful
sort of if the designer has already gone out
and designed the mobile application and wants feedback.
But I'm curious, maybe,
if you could sort of turn the problem around,
kind of on its head and say,
well, are there sort of prescriptive
design guidelines that we could use
before we even touch and before we even use
design any mobile application.
To sort of figure out how we would design
for a particular personality or characteristic.
- Thank you for your great questions.
Actually, I interviewed the experts
regarding these questions,
what are their established guidelines
for achieving specific brand personality.
Their response,
that actually there is no
specific guideline currently.
Even though there are guidelines,
like app guidelines for developing
ethical UI interfaces,
but not yet for designing brand personalities.
So the common practice is to
summarize some unique way themselves,
based on their experiments,
based on their experience,
and their ultimate knowledge
to theorize some patterns and design knowledge
to achieve specific design personality.
Yeah, and our feature analysis here
is hope to give some insight to the designers
which features might be important in general
for achieving specific brand personality.
Thank you.
- [Moderator] Are there still other questions?
No?
Then we came to the end of this session.
Thank you, Ziming.
- Thank you.
(applause)
- [Moderator] So I would propose that we
relax with a coffee break
after all this nice mathematics.
And also, I would like to thank all presenters
for sharing their research with us.
So have a nice --
hi
the coming days