One More Benefit of Good Web Design

Reference: Parboteeah, D.V., Valacich, J.S., and Wells, J.D. (2008) The influence of website characteristics on a consumer's urge to buy impulsively, Information Systems Research 20 (1), 60-78.

It's nice to know that a website's task-relevant cues (ie., appropriate information and good navigation) and mood-relevant cues (ie., visually appeal) increase consumers' urge to buy impulsively. Not that any designer would ever want to create a website deficient in either of these attributes.

While I have some doubts about the relevance of this study, I have little reason to doubt that improving website quality improves outcomes, including impulsive purchasing. The predicted magnitudes are somewhat suspect due to the nature of the experiments. All experiments were performed with students in a classroom setting and in no case were they actually buying anything -- they were simply reporting on their urge to buy. While students might represent the typical demographic of a web purchaser, the setting is anything but typical.

According to the first experiment, which used structural equation modeling, increasing visual appeal by one standard deviation increases urge to buy by .42 standard deviations and increasing information fit to task by one standard deviation increases urge to buy by .29 standard deviations. According to the second study, which used MANOVA to compare sites that had poor task-relevant and mood-relevant clues to sites that had good clues of task-relevance, mood-relevance, or both, impulsiveness increased from 61.1% of participants, to 72.2% with mood-relevant only, to 74.1% with task-relevant only, to 98% with both. Likewise, the magnitude of intended impulse buying increased from $33.89 to $49.17 to $55.56 to $66.39. Of course, this result is heavily dependent on what's being sold and what the potential impulse buys might be. In the experiment, the intended purchase was a $15 cell phone holster and the possible impulse buys were a $60 bag and several $15 accessories.