Understanding the Impacts of Design on the User Experience: Lessons from Online Shoppers Applied to eLearners

Effective visual design of e-commerce websites enhances website aesthetics and emotional appeal for the user, which can have a dramatic impact on users' engagement and willingness to share their personal information to purchase online. This talk will summarize the empirical results and implications of a series of recent publications that have outlined how design elements (such as human images, colour and interactivity components) can influence appeal, social presence, trustworthiness and eLoyalty. Differences across cultures will also be explored. While this work is within an e-commerce context, the potential implications of these results for the design of eLearning applications will also be discussed. Additionally, this talk will outline the importance of investigating research questions using multiple, diverse and complementary methodologies of quantitative, qualitative and new neuro-techniques.