A few years ago, at my previous employer (the one that was bought by my current employer), the consultants responsible for redesigning the company Web site walked us through the new home page, describing the rationale behind various elements. The link to a video describing the company’s products had a head-shot of the company’s VP of Marketing on it, because (the consultant explained) having a woman’s face on a home page increased the click-through rate.
Then the company missed its sales targets and had to lay off a third of its staff... including that VP of Marketing.
I'm going to sound like a broken record but I have to: if this had been A/B tested, either a) it would have been averted or b) we would have good reason to know, with statistical confidence, that despite that X came before Y, X did not in fact cause Y.
Anecdotally, faces have worked really, really well for some people. (Specific example coming at my Business of Software talk tomorrow, so I can't spoil it, but it will be livestreamed and have slides posted.)
In fairness, I think the circumstances leading up to the layoffs were not something that a better Web site could have prevented. The company was trying to expand into new markets with very different requirements than our previous customers, but it was spending more to acquire the new customers than it was actually receiving from them in revenue. Then the recession hit, and the investors decided that they would rather cash in their chips than double-down.
