Purpose: Beauty is widely used in the field of art, but when it enters the field of human-computer interaction, it takes the name of "computational aesthetics". Knowing the dimensions of aesthetics can help web designers to design a better user interface for users. The current research aims to identify, rank, and propose a conceptual framework for the aesthetic components of digital images on the web.
Methodology: The present research was carried out with the meta-synthesis method. The documents retrieved from 6 treasure databases, IRANDOC, ISC, SID, Google-Scholar, Emerald, and Web of Science, were retrieved and analyzed with a targeted keyword search and a systematic approach, including 1278 documents. The number of 54 documents were selected and included in the study with the PRISMA approach. The importance coefficient of the identified codes was calculated by Shannon's qualitative content analysis method. EndNote software was used to store and read documents carefully.
Findings: First, the basic conceptual framework was drawn based on the aesthetic theories of Kant, Berlyne, Leibniz, Adorno, Birkhoff, and Husserl, along with 15 documents in English, containing 2 categories, 4 concepts, and 22 aesthetic codes. Then, by performing meta-synthesis, the mentioned framework was upgraded to 2 categories, 4 concepts, and 32 codes. According to Shannon's formula, the two codes "symmetry" and "non-complexity" in the category of objective aesthetics and the two codes "attractive color combination" and "moderate complexity" in the category of subjective aesthetics were identified as having the highest "coefficient of importance".
Conclusion: It is equally important to pay attention to the codes of subjective aesthetics along with objective aesthetics. The current research emphasizes the scientific cooperation of two groups of experts in computer science and humanities to accurately perceive aesthetics and better interaction between humans and computers. The proposed conceptual framework is the first at the national (Iran) and international levels.
