The Influence of the Meaning of Pictures and Words on Web Page Recognition Performance

Firms spend high sums trying to make their “home” page as memorable as possible to attract repeat visits. For this purpose, fancy pictures and words are used to catch the attention of visitors. Interestingly, the effectiveness of all of this effort is nearly completely unknown. This study investigated how picture and word selections affected the recognition success rates of the sites visited by subjects. The clear finding in Cognitive Psychology is that meaningful pictures [4] and words [14] are remembered with much higher performance than non-meaningful ones. In corporate Web sites, therefore, attention can be paid to the meaningfulness of both pictures and words in attempting to make them more memorable. Building on previous research by cognitive researchers that suggests higher memory retention for meaningful pictures and words versus meaningless ones, we hypothesized that web pages where the salient picture and words are both business-meaning related (BMBM) will be much easier...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: HICSS
• Authors: Enrique Mu, Dennis F. Galletta
• Keywords: Biometrics, Dictionary Meaning, HICSS 2003, Pictures, Recognition Success Rate, System Sciences