Abstract
Establishing customer trust on an e-commerce website possibly requires the provision of an environment in which customers can overcome their fear and reluctance about shopping transactions by forming trust and positive perceptions about the online vendor. This research concentrates on color as a central factor in the design of web pages that enhance users’ positive emotional reactions as well as trust states and behaviors. Drawing on existing theories and empirical findings in the environmental psychology, human-computer interaction, as well as in the marketing and information systems research literature, a research model is developed to explain the relationships among background and foreground colors of a webpage, induced emotional responses in users, and users’ trust toward the website as mediated by users’ emotional states. A laboratory experiment was conducted to test the model and its associated hypotheses. This permitted assessment of the influence of background and foreground colors on user emotions and trust under varying brightness and saturation levels. Sixteen different graphic charts were evaluated based on various contrast ratios. We use the PAD (Pleasure Arousal Dominance) scale from Mehrabian and Russell (1974) and find that color can increase arousal, leading to stronger trust. Color leads to higher trust levels when arousal states are present at a high level. Our empirical findings provide valuable theoretical and practical implications regarding the effect of websites color on trust.
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Pelet, JE., Conway, C.M., Papadopoulou, P., Limayem, M. (2013). Chromatic Scales on Our Eyes: How User Trust in a Website Can Be Altered by Color via Emotion. In: Benghozi, PJ., Krob, D., Rowe, F. (eds) Digital Enterprise Design and Management 2013. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 205. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37317-6_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37317-6_10
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