1. Users ignore stock photos
If you’ve decided to build a new website, you might be tempted to use large, pretty stock photos of happy people either offering your services or receiving them. They look better than the photos you took of your business and cost less that what a professional photographer would charge for a photo shoot.
However, research shows that “big feel-good images that are purely decorative […] are completely ignored“.
2. People photos: use real people, preferably smiling
In a study by Nielsen Norma Group, users spent 10% more time viewing the portrait photos than reading the biographies, but ignored stock photos of generic people.
Another study by Specs shows that a photo of a person smiling gets a lot more user attention than that of a non-smiling person.
3. Product photos: use photos with plenty of details
Another study by NN Group comparing 2 ecommerce category pages showed that photos with enough details got 5 times more fixations than generic photos that didn’t allow for any differentiation between products.
