Measuring the impact of visual design cues on conversion rates

Abstract

On the Internet, websites are what represent a company. Although a website provides a lot of information about the company itself, for years these have been failing to turn the visitors into customers. The correct use of visual design cues can effectively help in guiding the users to perform what the company wants them to achieve. This is called conversion. The higher the percentage of turning visitors to customers, the higher the conversion rate. This research has particularly focused on how visual design cues help in achieving higher conversion rates. By comparing two visual cues through a newly created website, namely arrows and eye-directional human faces, this research concluded that while the latter cue attracted more attention, the former achieved a higher conversion rate. This research has also given insights on how to increase the effectiveness of advertisements presented within an article page. It was found that, by introducing a two second delay in appearance to advertisements, their effectiveness was increased by 40% in terms of recall over ads that appeared with no delays.