Impacts of website design on online consumers

Together with the explosive growth of Internet population, Internet has increasingly become a popular platform for shopping among Internet users. This thesis intends to investigate the impacts of website design elements on potential and existing online consumers’ perceptions. Specifically, this thesis focuses on two website design elements—animation and cultural elements—that can be incorporated into the websites. The first essay investigates the effectiveness of three identified feature-level animation characteristics (motion, looming and lagging) in attracting online users’ attention and how the effects of these three animation characteristics vary across browsing and searching tasks. The results show that motion and looming animation significantly increases attention allocated to the animated items and their effects are stronger when online users perform browsing tasks than when they perform searching tasks. Also, the feature-level animation characteristics have interferences with each other. The findings of this study help to explain mixed findings of prior studies. The second essay complements prior studies that focused on the effects of animation on short-term memory (e.g. recall) and examines how the application of animation on content of web pages will influence the attention allocated to the animated object and the remaining nonanimated objects on the same web page, across different tasks. The results showed that the application of animation on a particular object increases attention to all objects on the same web page. The third essay investigates how the effects of perceived social presence on trust will be contingent on the activated cultural values. The results show that the impacts of perceived social presence on benevolence and predictability dimensions are contingent on the cultural values activated by cultural elements incorporated into the websites. This study contributes to existing literature by providing new insights on social presence, trust and cultural elements incorporated into the websites