Effects of visual and textual information in online product presentations: Looking for the best combination in website design

Online product presentation constitutes a key challenge for marketers and designers who want to satisfy consumers' needs. Visual and textual product information affect recognition and knowledge about the product. This research examines whether the presence (vs absence) of a product image and textual information in a schematic mode (vs paragraph mode) affect users' recall and perceptions of the quality of the electronic products' information. The moderating role of user's familiarity with the website and product also may play a role; the evolution of these variables likely will determine trends in e-commerce research. The results show that a schematic display of textual information improves perceptions of information quality. When a picture of the product appears together with textual information, users remember more information and consider it easier to remember if that information appears schematically. However, without a product picture, users allocate more resources to process paragraph information and therefore recall more information and perceive it as easier to recall. The degrees of familiarity also have important directional effects on these relationships. European Journal of Information Systems (2010) 19, 668-686. doi:10.1057/ejis.2010.42; published online 17 August 2010