The Influence Of Online Faces On Induced User Preferences

In the era of e-commerce and m-commerce,with the widely application of big data and cloud computing,the closely integrated online and offline life constitute the modern people's world.Given the sales of "Double Eleven Festival" increases every year,electronic commences have the potential to go beyond traditional shops.Online merchants have pay much attention to enrich and complete the visual design of online pages,mobile web pages and APP.Successful visual design can enhance users' trust and meet their emotional demands,so it can bring profits to online merchants.How to seize attention,arouse emotion and induce favorable user behavior is an essential question that marketers are asking everyday.Online faces can be the key to touch the heart of online users and are frequently used elements in webage designs for online product demonstration.Effective design of online faces can not only draw attention of the browsers but also arouse emotional responses and further more induce favorable user behavior,therefore is an essential topic in the areas of e-commerce business design and consumer behavior studies.The evaluation of faces is not single,but muti-dimensional.Different characteristics of faces can stimulate users' different emotions,resulting in different evaluation and effect.The two most frequent words people describe faces are beauty and trust.Beauty is facial attractiveness and trust is facial trustworthiness.Online facial attractiveness and trustworthiness as different face characteristics independently play a role in stimulating users'emotional experience and inducing the users' online behavior preferences.Leveraging multiple research methodologies including behavior experiments and quesionnaire survey under the scenario of different characteristics of online faces,this research comprehensively summarizes online faces,facial attractiveness and facial trustworthiness.Then Dual-Process Theory is introduced as the most important theoretical basis in this article.This research builds conceptual models to analyze the inducing effect of online faces on user choice behavior(such as emotional and rational experience).According to the collected data,structural equation modeling was conducted to test the model.Research findings show that the effects of facial attractiveness and facial trustworthiness on consumer decision and behavior are both positive.The effect of facial attractiveness is greater than that of facial trustworthiness.Furthermore,the effects of facial attractiveness and facial trustworthiness on consumer decision and behavior are mediated by emotional experience and rational experience.Rational experience includes perceived social presence,perceived trustworthiness and perceived expertise.Finally,the limitations of this paper and the prospect of future research are discussed.The innovation of this paper lies in the fact that the research object is aimed at different characteristics of online faces and adopts a combination of behavioral experiments and questionaires to demonstrate that facial attractiveness has a greater impact on consumer decision than facial trustworthiness,which shows attractiveness is primary factor in facial characteristics.