网购平台产品图片视觉特征的影响作用研究

The effects of product pictures' visual features in the context of online purchasing

网络购物已成为消费者重要的电子商务活动。在网购平台中产品图片是商家传递商品信息的重要渠道,良好的图片设计能给用户带来完美的视觉体验,从而促进用户的网购决策。现有电子商务网页产品图片研究较少,图片特征如何影响用户决策存在诸多研究空间。本文结合视觉美学、认知注意以及情绪等理论,从复杂度和对称性这两个主要视觉特征考察了产品图片对网购用户认知和情绪的影响作用。研究设计了含有低复杂度和高复杂度以及不对称性和对称性的产品图片网购页面,通过眼动追踪实验研究方法,收集被试的眼动数据,运用重复测量方差分析进行数据处理。研究结果表明:产品图片对称性对用户情绪(瞳孔大小)有显著影响作用;产品图片复杂度对用户注意(注视点)有显著影响作用。本文研究丰富了产品图片美学理论以及电子商务网络营销和人机交互研究理论,同时也为网站管理者和设计者如何选择或设计合适的产品图片提供了科学的实践建议和指导价值。

Online shopping has become an important E-commerce activity for consumers. In the context of online shopping, product picture is an important channel for the sellers to deliver merchandise information to consumers. A well-designed picture can give customers a perfect visual experience and facilitate online shopping decision. There is little research focusing on the product picture, which remains a research gap to investigate how the product pictures features influence the users’ decision-making. Based on aesthetic theory, cognitive theory and emotional theory, the study tries to explore how the E-commerce product pictures affect the consumers’ emotion and cognition from the two critical visual design features - complexity and symmetry. The paper analyzes the role of complexity and symmetry in detail and proposes four hypotheses. Hypothesis 1 (H1) is that product picture’s complexity negatively influences consumer’s emotion. Hypothesis 2 (H2) is that product picture’s symmetry positively influences consumer’s emotion. Hypothesis 3 (H3) is that product picture’s complexity positively influences consumer’s attention. Hypothesis 4 (H4) is that product picture’s symmetry positively influences the attention of consumers. We conducted the within subject 2 (low complexity vs. high complexity)* 2 (asymmetry vs. symmetry) eye-tracking experiment to test these hypotheses. We manipulated the two visual features by designing different web pages for the subjects. The pretest was conducted to confirm the successful manipulation of complexity and symmetry. We used eye-tracker to track the eye-movement data from 43 college students by collecting their pupil size’s maximum and fixation counts to measure their emotional and cognitive reactions. The results of repeated measures ANOVA analysis are shown as follows:(1) The product picture’s complexity has no significant impact on the consumer’s emotion (F=2.182,p=0.149), not supporting H1. The product picture’s symmetry positively influences the consumer’s emotion(F=11.402,p=0.002), and furthermore, the emotional arousal is significantly higher in symmetric situations than in asymmetric situations, which supports H2. Besides, the complexity and symmetry of product pictures have no significant interaction on the consumer’s emotion (F=0.321, p=0.574).(2) The product picture’s complexity positively influences consumer’s attention (F=17.340, p=0.000), and consumer’s attention is significantly higher in high complexity situations than in low complexity situations, which concludes that H3 is supported. The product picture’s symmetry has no significant impact on consumer’s attention (F=0.012, p=0.915), which denotes that H4 is not supported. In addition, the complexity and symmetry of product pictures have no significant interaction on the consumer’s attention (F=2.220, p=0.145). This paper makes some theoretical contributions by enriching the research fields of Aesthetics, E-commerce online marketing and human-computer interaction. First, the prior aesthetic research in IS fields focused more on the perspective of the whole web page instead of the product pictures - one critical element on the web page. This paper gives a new research perspective for IS and HCI fields by analyzing the role of E-commerce page’s product picture aesthetics. Second, this paper examines the impact of critical features of product pictures by integrating user’s cognitive and emotional reactions, which provides an analytical perspective by combining cognition and emotion to study online user’s decisions and online pictures’ visual aesthetics in IS areas. Third,we used eye tracking methods to obtain objective physiological data from the users, which supplements the traditional methods of subjective data collection such as questionnaire and interview in previous IS research. This paper can promote the research development of studying online product picture aesthetics by using physiological cognitive neuroscience methods, which promote research progress of NeuroIS as well. Besides, the study results also provide practical implications for E-commerce website managers and designers to choose and design product pictures. In the process of selecting and customizing the online product pictures, website managers and designers can try to stimulate customers’ emotions by using more symmetric product pictures or attract their attentions by adopting the higher complexity for product pictures, which eventually promotes online purchase decisions.