How does the visual aesthetics of positively-framed messages impact their motivational capacity?

Many people nowadays engage with motivational text messages embedded in a visual presentation. However, empirical studies of the impact of textual messages on users’ motivation to exercise have paid little attention to how their visual appeal impacts their motivational capacity. We conducted an online experiment to explore the impact of visual aesthetics on the motivational capacity of positively-framed textual messages. Participants were assigned to three conditions: positively-framed messages a) presented as text-only (no-aesthetics), b) presented with high visual appeal (beautiful), and c) presented with low visual appeal (ugly). Contrary to our expectations, the perceived visual appeal of a message show no impact on its motivational capacity in terms of how motivating it was perceived to be, nor on extrinsic identified behavior regulation. The implications of these results on the design of interactive systems, and physical activity trackers in particular, are discussed herein.