“I Know It When I See It”: How Experts and Novices Recognize Good Design

Design novices have limited design experience and typically lack the skills or confidence to create good design, however, they may be able to recognize good design. To assess this ability, 53 novice designers and 52 expert designers participated in an online study where they evaluated a series of websites based on aesthetic appeal using two different modes of comparison. Results show that both experts and novices are able to recognize good design and that novices are able to do so almost as well as experts (76.5% accuracy compared to 81.2%). The greatest determinant of whether a participant would correctly identify a higher-rated design was the difference in the two websites’ ground-truth aesthetic ratings. However, expertise and the mode by which the comparison was presented had a significant impact on accuracy (Keep-the-Best = 83.6% and Tournament = 74.1%).