Essays on the influence of website emotional design features on users' emotional and behavioral responses

Abstract

As the Internet technologies have become more advanced, as well as online users that have become more sophisticated, the competition in the e-commerce is increasingly aggressive for online vendors. Therefore, online user experience has emerged as a major issue in developing strategies for online vendors to gain advantage over such changing competitive landscape. Although past studies have widely explored the online user experience, they largely focus on the website design feature (designer) perspective and often ignore the user perspective. Considering both design feature and user perspectives, this research provides a better understanding how different website design features enhance user experience.

Three essays are conducted in this dissertation to address the importance of website design features in influencing user experience. The first essay explores how website visual appeal and ease of use impact users' perceptions of usefulness, trust, and intention to use in the context of unfamiliar website. The study reveals that visual appeal produces a greater influence on the users' perceptions than ease of use. The findings also indicate that both visual appeal and ease of use are contributing factors in developing online trust among male users, with visual appeal dominating trust formation among female users.

The second essay investigates how website visual order and complexity influence users' initial aesthetic impressions of a website, and how these impressions subsequently impact engagement and intention to use the website. An experiment is conducted to test the durability of the visual design features across two exposure times (1-second vs. no time limit). The results suggest that user can quickly evaluate websites (within 1 second), and these evaluations remain consistent even when time constraints are removed. In addition, the findings also reveal the importance of visual order on user attention span and attention on design elements presented on web pages.

The third essay examines how individual differences in the centrality of visual aesthetics (CVA) influence users' perceptions of a website. A series of three experiments is conducted in this study to provide guidelines how to capture CVA, as well as how CVA subsequently influence users' response toward a website.