Coloring in the Lines: Using Color to Change the Perception of Quality in E-Commerce sites

E-commerce sites, like their brick-and-mortar cousins, are designed to draw in potential customers and encourage purchases and brand loyalty. Currently, E-commerce website designs are often rejected by their user community, which costs money through wasted development and lost customers. User acceptance is the goal of every design choice – and yet little work has extrapolated from the known affective responses users have to color to website design. We posit that a better understanding of user reactions to color will increase user perceptions of quality. We hypothesize that color saturation and brightness cause an affective reaction in the user, which can change the user's trust in the site, and through this their perception of a site's quality. In an experimental lab study, we find support for our hypotheses, providing suggestions for future website design to improve customer acceptance.