Abstract
The rapid increase in the use of mobile technology and online communication has facilitated more opportunities for social interactions as well as for online fraud. Warnings are one of the last lines of defense in transaction security. Many warnings used in anti-fraud processes are often ineffective due to habituation and the trial-and-error method used in their design. Following psychological theories of persuasion and warning design principles, in this paper, we design fourteen warnings and examine their effectiveness in an eye-tracker experiment (Study 1) and in an online A/B test on the Alipay platform (Study 2). Based on the communication-human information processing (C-HIP) model, Study 1 found that pictorial signal icons and persuasion strategies significantly improved the effectiveness of warnings. Specifically, pictorial signal icons attracted users’ attention better than the conventional signal icons, and warnings with authority, social influence, diversion, questioning, and multiple strategies performed better than those without a persuasion strategy. Study 2 showed that our warnings performed better than the original Alipay warnings. The overall case rate was reduced by 33.2%, avoiding at least 30 million yuan in economic losses. Our work contributes to the field of security warning design with both theoretical and practical value and provides an important reference for future research.
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