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The purpose of this paper is to develop and test a method that can gradually find a sweet spot between user experience and visual intensity of website elements to maximise user conversion with minimal adverse effect.

In the first phase of the study, the authors develop the method. In the second stage, the authors test and evaluate the method via an empirical study; also, an experiment was conducted within web interface with the gradual intensity of visual elements.

The findings reveal that the negative response grows faster than conversion when the visual intensity of the web interface is increased. However, a saturation point, where there is coexistence between maximum conversion and minimum negative response, can be found.

The findings imply that efforts to attract user attention should be pursued with increased caution and that a gradual approach presented in this study helps in finding a site-specific sweet spot for a level of visual intensity by incrementally adjusting the elements of the interface and tracking the changes in user behaviour.

Web marketing and advertising professionals often face the dilemma of determining the optimal level of visual intensity of interface element. Excessive use of marketing component and attention-grabbing visual elements can lead to an inferior user experience and consequent user churn due to growing intrusiveness. At the same time, too little visual intensity can fail to steer users. The present study provides a gradual approach which aids in finding a balance between user experience and visual intensity, maximising user conversion and, thus, providing a practical solution for the problem.

The purpose of this study is to examine how visual elements along with textual narratives are used to disclose workplace diversity-related information in corporate social and environmental reports.

A qualitative content analysis is used to examine the workplace diversity-related information in the 2016 standalone sustainability/corporate responsibility reports of 47 Fortune companies. A total of 539 tables, figures and photographs and their related textual narratives are analysed through an impression management lens.

The study finds that multiple types of visual elements are used to supplement textual narratives to communicate workplace diversity-related messages. The positive and often non-verifiable workplace diversity-related information is symbolically suggestive of the companies’ workplace diversity commitment and success. While tables and figures are typically presented using numbers, percentages and words to enhance and promote the positive information, the “feel-good” photographs are used to arouse positive feelings in the readers. These visual elements are presented in either a single-visual or mixed-visual presentation form.

This study has the potential to inform and assist preparers in the use of multiple visual elements and textual narratives to promote an impartial and substantive reporting of workplace diversity-related information. Understanding the motivation behind the usage and presentation of visual elements can be useful for the promulgation of guidelines for workplace diversity disclosure, and make readers aware that the visual elements can be exploited for impression management and symbolic legitimacy.

This study provides empirical evidence on the use of multiple types of visual elements in the reporting of workplace diversity-related information. It demonstrates how these visual elements are strategically used and presented to deliver an impression of workplace diversity to the readers.

The purpose of this paper is to understand young children’s knowledge of visual literacy elements as well as their ability to comprehend newly introduced visual literacy concepts. The study also examined existing support for visual literacy programs from parents and educators.

The study explored the knowledge of basic visual literacy elements of young children enrolled in two private schools in the New York City metropolitan area. The authors interviewed 17 children, aged four to six years old, about fine art paintings using a semi-structured interview format. Children’s responses were qualitatively analyzed to determine their initial level of visual literacy and their ability to learn and retain the concepts of visual literacy after receiving basic instruction. The children’s educators and parents completed online questionnaires that were quantitatively analyzed to determine their level of support for visual literacy programs.

The findings show that young children exhibited extensive knowledge of simple visual literacy elements (color, shape, line), and limited understanding of more abstract elements (perspective and salience). Children’s knowledge of visual elements improved after instruction. Parents and educators expressed support for incorporating visual literacy instruction in early childhood education.

The study relied on a sample of children and adults drawn from two private schools. The sample’s demographics might have affected study findings. More studies are needed using a larger and more diverse sample.

The study suggests that young children are ready to receive instruction on visual literacy elements using art images. Children reacted positively to the images and were engaged in the discussions about them, supporting the use of fine art paintings as an instrument to introduce visual literacy concepts to young children. Survey of children’s parents and teachers indicated strong interest in, and support for such programs.

With the increase of visual information production and consumption, it is important to introduce visual literacy early in life. The study advances research in methods for developing visual literacy instruction for young children.

There are no previously reported studies that have examined pre-kindergarten children’s knowledge of basic visual literacy elements and reactions to visual literacy instruction.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of recalling visual and child-oriented product packaging elements vs informational content on children’s influence on household purchases.

The study was conducted using quantitative research among 100 French consumers of breakfast cereals aged six to 11.

The paper challenges previous findings. First, the recall of the various types of packaging elements was equivalent across age groups. Second, the impact of visual and child-oriented element recall on purchase influences was high, especially for younger children, but not superior to the impact of recalling informational packaging elements. Third, adding information and other elements to visuals reduced young children’s intentions to influence purchases, suggesting that the overload – not the nature – of elements has a negative impact. Fourth, packaging recall seemed weakly related to purchase influence – at least for well-known brands.

Further research on larger samples will allow to encompass potential moderators such as brand context, consumer context and packaging stimulus. Research should also compare the positive (reassuring) influence of adding informational elements on mothers to the negative one it has on children’s influence.

These findings can be used to wisely plan retailers’ packaging strategy. But all in all, retail packaging represents only one of the many factors which impact upon children’s diet and food consumptions and should be reassessed in the face other influences.

The findings challenge and expand one’s knowledge on the relationship between children and the relative influence of child-oriented elements and information, across age groups.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between the number of design elements in the context of building facades in urban streetscapes and visual preferences of users to enable a more meaningful citizen participation in the design of local streetscapes.

This paper developed a web application, which manages experiments through programmatically creating scenes and displaying them online to participants using questionnaires. It collects preferences towards the number of design elements in the scenes and determines the statistical relationship between them.

The results offer an empirical description of a semi-convex relationship between the number of elements and preferences. They confirm that participants from a particular area inter-subjectively agree in their visual judgements towards the number of design elements, and justify the employment of a regression model fitted on the preferences of residents to assess design proposal in their area.

The paper offers an empirical description of the relationships between preferences and a wide range of values of the number of design elements and empirically supports that people from one area inter-subjectively agree in their judgements towards a visual aspect of the building facades. The study introduces a new analytical component, known as the vertex, which could alter future methods on the visual evaluation of the built environment.

Adopting a brand prominence perspective, this study aims to examine how textual and visual brand elements influence the success of crowdfunding campaigns for aftermarket offerings.

A Python-based Web scraper was used to collect data from 620 crowdfunding campaigns for aftermarket offerings hosted on Kickstarter. The linguistic inquiry and word count application programing interface was then used to analyze the linguistic aspects of these campaigns. A fixed effects regression model was used to evaluate the hypotheses.

Textual and visual brand prominence are positively associated with campaign success. Further, with some variations, both types of brand prominence augment the positive effects of narrative and graphic design elements on campaign success.

This study makes novel theoretical contributions to the literature on branding, crowdfunding and aftermarket products. The results also provide practical insights to aftermarket enterprises on creating compelling crowdfunding campaigns.

By analyzing the direct and synergistic effects of branding, narrative and graphic design elements on crowdfunding success, this study extends various literature streams and identifies several future research opportunities.

Art-infusion has become a common practice among brands across the globe. This is because marketers leverage the uniqueness and prestige of arts to earn superior profits. Hence, this research aims to understand and measure consumers' willingness to pay (WTP) for art-infused products.

A questionnaire was designed based on conjoint analysis and was responded to by 470 respondents from India. The estimation of preference functions in conjoint analysis was intended to use orthogonal arrays to measure WTP.

The study reveals consumers' utility and WTP for different art-infused products. The results indicated that consumers have the highest WTP for products that have artwork dominated by the visual elements of colour, shapes and space.

The paper presents valuable findings for marketers to develop their product design and earn superior profits.

This is the first study in the domain of the art infusion phenomenon that measures WTP for non-luxury art-infused products. Also, this is the first study to measure WTP for different kinds of art forms.

Literature concerning branding elements is vast yet sporadic. Whilst many academics focus on one or a number of branding design elements, none have yet designed a holistic framework to demonstrate the variety of alternatives. The purpose of this paper is to identify the branding design elements within online fashion web sites and propose how they may be utilised within the design of mobile applications. An academic or practitioner must outline a taxonomy of branding elements before they can begin to empirically test their effects. It cannot be assumed that the online consumer is the same as the mobile consumer, and therefore research into how to design successful mobile fashion applications is essential.

Branding design elements are extracted from branding literature and described in the context of online and mobile utilisation. The elements are demonstrated within a holistic framework of m‐branding design elements presented for both commercial and academic appreciation. Research implications and future research avenues are additionally explored.

The paper identifies 11 m‐branding design elements classified within four key categories relating to their purpose and consistency to the brand identity.

Literature concerning the design of fashion mobile applications is scarce. With expectations of smart phone figures reaching 1.7 billion by 2013, it is the most lucrative time to be researching how the design of the mobile application might affect the behaviours of the mobile consumer. This paper is a first step in providing information as to the m‐branding elements available for utilisation within a fashion brand's mobile strategy.

Little research has been done to understand how individual elements (e.g. advertisements) within a webpage are processed and evaluated when visual complexity is increased. Thus, this study aimed to investigate how consumers allocate attention and evaluate products and advertisements on complex webpages when they are casually browsing.

This study conducted two experiments to test the causal effects of different degrees of visual complexity on consumer responses to products and advertisements. An eye-tracking experiment (n = 90) and a follow-up online experiment (n = 121) were conducted using undergraduate students as participants.

Participants formed a global impression from the overall webpage complexity, which spilled over to evaluation of individual elements on the webpage (e.g. product, advertisement). The inverted U-shaped relationships (vs. linear negative relationships) between webpage visual complexity and attitude toward the webpage, products, and advertisements were observed. The focal product was given a consistent level of attention regardless of the complexity level.

This study provides implications for website organization and design to maximize positive consumer experiences and marketing effectiveness. The findings provide implications for retailers and advertisement buyers.

This study expanded the knowledge by examining the interplay between individual elements of webpages and the whole webpage complexity when consumers browse visually complex webpages. It is a novel finding that the overall webpage complexity effect spills over to locally attended products or advertisements.

This paper aims to consider the visual literacy mobilized by consumers in their use of brand aesthetics to construct and communicate a curated self.

The research surveyed a range of visual material from Instagram. Specifically, the goal was to use “compositional interpretation”, an approach to visual analysis that is not methodologically explicit but which, in itself, draws upon the visual literacy of the researcher to provide a descriptive analysis of the formal visual quality of images as distinct from their symbolic resonances. The research also incorporates 10 phenomenological-type interviews with consumers. Consistent with a phenomenological approach, informants were selected because they have “lived” the experience under investigation, in this case requiring them to be keen consumers of the Orla Kiely brand.

Findings indicate that consumers deploy their visual literacy in strategic visualization (imaginatively planning and coordinating artifacts with other objects in their collection, positioning and using them as part of an overall visual repertoire), composition (becoming active producers of images) and emergent design (turning design objects into display pieces, repurposing design objects or simply borrowing brand aesthetics to create designed objects of their own).

This research has implications for the understanding of visual literacy within consumer culture. Engaging comprehensively with the visual compositions of consumers, this research moves beyond brand symbolism, semiotics or concepts of social status to examine the self-conscious creation of a curated self. The achievement of such a curated self depends on visual literacy and the deployment of abstract design language by consumers in the pursuit of both aesthetic satisfaction and social communication.

This research has implications for brand designers and managers in terms of how they might control or manage the use of brand aesthetics by consumers.

To date, there has been very little consumer research that explores the nature of visual literacy and even less that offers an empirical investigation of this concept within the context of brand aesthetics. The research moves beyond brand symbolism, semiotics and social status to consider the deployment of abstract visual language in communicating the curated self.