Aesthetic design of app interfaces and their impact on secondary students’ interest and learning

• The impact of aesthetic designs on students’ interest and learning was examined. • Two different designs of a learning app on science content were created. • Results confirmed the positive effects of aesthetic design on students’ interest. • Students’ aesthetic experience induced by the design positively impacted learning. • The study provides new implications for designing learning apps. Interest in science topics is an important prerequisite for science learning and achievement. Here, as part of a field experiment, we studied whether teenagers’ interest and learning of physics topics would be influenced by the aesthetics of a multimedia learning app. More specifically, we investigated with the example of learning about energy (types of power plants) how different interface designs of a multimedia learning app would influence aesthetic experience, interest, and learning outcome. In our study Swiss high school students (N = 108) were assigned to one of two conditions (i.e., game-style vs. industrial-style ) differing in various aesthetic features. Results indicate that high-quality interfaces support learning and expressive aesthetic design features additionally foster interest in order to engage with the topic. Moreover, our findings on aesthetic experience suggest that deep perceptual processes , such as emotion and cognitive stimulation induced by interfaces, further impact interest and learning. Thus, our study gives implications for the design of interest-generating and learning-supporting science apps for teenagers and emphasizes the significance to consider aesthetic experience in future research.