[Sigia-l] "seals of approval" for Web sites
Jonathan Baker-Bates <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.comp.web.sigia |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
On 4 January 2011 14:29, Dan Chamberlain <[email protected]> wrote: > All, > > I would like to hear some thoughts around "seals of approval" for Web > sites. For example: an organization or vendor reviews your site and then > awards you with an icon that symbolizes the sites Security or Usability. Do > users respect these or ignore them? If you use them, do you place them at > the bottom or top of the page? Which are the most trusted? > I've observed a pretty consistent faith placed in such seals (Verisign, eTrust), with people often spontaneously pointing them out in checkout paths as reasons to trust the vendor. We have sometimes probed for their level of understanding of what these marks mean, but most people seem not to know much about it beyond a vague association with "trust" that they feel comfortable with. This also applies to the other very common observation of people looking for the "little padlock" in their browser. Very few people can articulate what that actually means, but (for now at least) it doesn't seem to matter to them. In Germany, a TUV compliance mark is a big deal, and is well understood, so it definitely gets noticed and respected by customers. Consequently, we place them in the most prominent positions we can (usually next to credit card input, but also elsewhere). We relegate them to page footers outside the checkout path though, since we also observe hardly anyone caring about payment issues much before they get serious about a purchase. The only exception to this that I've found is in China (lab tests with 20 customers in Shanghai last December), where most people make online payments via their banks. They don't have much reason to look for trust marks, since they assume their bank has done the due diligence before hand for them. This is also anecdotally the case for some consumers in India, although I've not verified that. Jonathan <http://www.youtube.com/domcorpcomm> ------------ 2011 IA Summit March 30 - April 3, 2011 Pre Conference Seminars: March 30-31 IA Summit: April 1-3 Hyatt Regency Convention Center Denver, CO ----- When replying, please *trim your post* as much as possible. *Plain text, please; NO Attachments Searchable Archive at http://www.info-arch.org/lists/sigia-l/ ________________________________________ Sigia-l mailing list -- post to: [email protected] Changes to subscription: http://mail.asis.org/mailman/listinfo/sigia-l