Eye-Catcher of Blind Spot? The Effect of Photographs of Faces on eCommerce Sites

E-commerce still suffers from consumers' lack of trust. Most e-commerce researchers focus on building trust through cues that appeal to rational decision-making. These cues are usually implemented as text (e.g. privacy policies). In print advertising, affective attitudes and trust are commonly built by using photographs of people. On the web, however, users as well as interface design experts believe that photos impair task performance by attracting visual attention. In this study we compared online-shoppers' gaze patterns on pages with a photo of a person to pages with a text box of the same size. Our data does not support the claim that photographs decrease task performance. In fact, users spend more time looking at the text box. We found that the photograph attracts more attention than the text box on a first time view of a particular page. However, participants quickly learn the structure of a page and ignore the photo on subsequent pages. We outline further research, incorporating physiological measurements to infer user cost and affective responses.