Trust is a significant factor in e-commerce businesses. Lui
et al. (2010) conducted an experiment to determine whether smile of an online
recommendation agent affects the trust of users.
A recommendation agent is
software that determines the preferences of users and recommends products and
services in online shopping activities.
Naturalistic avatar, a humanoid in form
of human-like appearance, was used as a recommendation agent in this study. The
trusting beliefs were decided as ‘competence’, ‘integrity’ and ‘benevolence’.
An experimental website was developed for shopping a laptop by participants. They
were told that they were supposed to choose a laptop for a friend who does not
know much about laptops. Before making a choice, they interacted with a
recommendation agent.
After making a final choice of laptop, the conclusions were
drawn. The smiling agents were perceived as more competent than non-smiling
agents; while smiling agents were not perceived to have higher integrity and
more benevolence than non-smiling agents.
The trust can be built using facial
expression of a recommendation agent. So, while designing avatars as recommendations
agents for websites, design a smiling agent to interact with people. It will
make them believe they are interacting with competent avatars who recommend
them a better product.
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Reference - Siu
Man Lui, School of Business (Information Technology), James Cook University,
Cairns, Australia. And Wendy Hui, The University of Nottingham, Ningbo, China.
Research paper name - Effects of Smiling and Gender on Trust toward a
Recommendation Agent.
Published in - International Conference on Cyberworlds
(2010)
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(Image courtesy of Ambro at FreeDigitalPhotos.net)
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