Online trust is considered as a critical factor in online shopping, especially when dealing with unfamiliar vendors. This research provides empirical findings from an experimental investigation of ...the influence of website emotional design features, visual appeal and ease of use on users' perceptions of usefulness, trust, as well as intention to use websites. The proposed research model was developed based on theories in the human-computer interaction and Information Systems domains. An experiment was conducted using a hypothetical website with four conditions of treatment manipulation. The study revealed that visual appeal can produce a greater influence on customers’ evaluation of trust, than ease of use. It was also found that both visual appeal and ease of use are contributing factors in developing online trust among male customers, with visual appeal dominating trust formation among female customers.
•Empirical study examining effects of web features on trust in unfamiliar vendors.•Combining theories from both the HCI and IS domains.•Visual appeal is an important determinant of trust in the unfamiliar vendor context.•Gender effect: Visual appeal is more important to female than male in forming trust.•The results are different from prior studies that dealt primarily with familiar websites.
With the growing importance of communicating with the public via the web, many industries have used web analytics to provide information that organizations can use to better achieve their goals. ...Although the importance of health care websites has also grown, the health care industry has been slower to adopt the use of web analytics. Web analytics are the measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of internet data used to measure direct user interaction. Our objective is to provide generalized methods for using web analytics as key performance metrics to evaluate websites and outline actionable recommendations for improvement. By deconstructing web analytic categories such as engagement, users, acquisition, content, and platform, we describe how web analytics are used to evaluate websites and how improvements can be made using this information. Engagement is how a user interacts with a website. It can be evaluated using the daily active users to monthly active users (DAU/MAU) ratio, bounce rate, pages viewed, and time on site. Poor engagement indicates potential problems with website usability. Users pertains to demographic information regarding the users interacting with a website. This data can help administrators understand who is engaging with their website. Acquisition refers to the overall website traffic and the method of traffic, which allows administrators to see how people are accessing their website. This information helps websites expand their methods of attracting users. Content refers to the overall relevancy, accuracy, and trustworthiness of a website's content. If a website has poor content, it will likely experience difficulty with user engagement. Finally, platform refers to the technical aspects of how people access a website. It includes both the internet browsers and devices used. By providing detailed descriptions of these categories, we have identified how web administrators can use web analytics to systematically assess their websites. We have also provided generalized recommendations for actionable improvements. By introducing the potential of web analytics to augment usability and the conversion rate, we hope to assist health care organizations in better communicating with the public and therefore accomplishing the goals of their websites.
Though aesthetics is generally acknowledged as an important aspect of website design, extant information systems (IS) research on web user experience has rarely studied what affects website ...aesthetics and how aesthetics influences users' perceptions of the website and the organization behind the website. In this paper, we synthesize prior literature from different academic domains and propose users' perceived quality of five design elements (i.e., unity, complexity, intensity, novelty, and interactivity) as determinants of website aesthetics. We further theorize the effects of aesthetics on users' attitudes toward the website and their perception of the corporate image. Two studies were conducted to test the research model. In Study 1, we adopted a card sorting method and the results provide substantial support to the determinants of website aesthetics. In Study 2, we conducted a survey using ten company portal websites that were unknown to survey respondents. Our analysis further confirms the effects of users' perceived quality of the five design elements on the perception of website aesthetics. The findings of Study 2 also show that users' perception of aesthetics has significant impacts on perceived utility and their attitudes toward the website, which further affects the corporate image exhibited via the website. In addition, we find that in users' first interaction with a website, perceived aesthetics has a larger impact on their attitudes toward the website than perceived utility.
With the proliferation of e-commerce, there is growing evidence that online impulse buying is occurring, yet relatively few researchers have studied this phenomenon. This paper reports on two studies ...that examine how variations in a website influence online impulse buying. The results reveal some relevant insights about this phenomenon. Specifically, although many participants had the urge to buy impulsively, regardless of website quality, this behavior's likelihood and magnitude was directly influenced by varying the quality of task-relevant and mood-relevant cues. Task-relevant cues include characteristics, such as navigability, that help in the attainment of the online consumer's shopping goal. Conversely, mood-relevant cues refer to the characteristics, such as visual appeal, that affect the degree to which a user enjoys browsing a website but that do not directly support a particular shopping goal. The implications of the results for both future research and the design of human-computer interfaces are discussed.
Along with the rapid development of network technologies, the server-side of an e-commerce website is becoming more and more untrustworthy. Thus, how to prevent the disclosure of users’ behavior ...privacy in online business activities has attracted people’s wide attention. Aiming at the protection of users’ commodity viewing privacy in a commercial website, this paper proposes to construct a group of dummy requests on a trusted client, then, which are submitted together with a user commodity viewing request to the untrusted server-side, so as to confuse and cover up the user preferences. First, we define a privacy model for a user commodity viewing service, in which we introduce a concept called entropy for commodity viewing probability to measure the confusion effect of dummy requests on user requests, and we introduce a concept called regional distance among commodity categories to measure the cover-up effect of dummy requests on users’ commodity viewing preferences. Second, we design an implementation algorithm to generate a group of ideal dummy requests that can meet the constraints formulated in the privacy model. Finally, both theoretical analysis and experimental evaluation demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, i.e., which can improve the security of users’ commodity viewing privacy on the untrusted server-side, without compromising the availability of an e-commerce website. In this paper, we present a valuable research attempt to the protection of users’ behavior privacy in a commercial website, which is of positive significance for building a privacy-preserving e-commerce platform.
Editorial Schmeling, Sascha Marc
IEEE transactions on nuclear science,
01/2021, Volume:
68, Issue:
8
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
This issue of the IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science (TNS) is devoted to the 22nd IEEE-NPSS Real Time Conference (RT2020) on Computing Applications in Nuclear and Plasma Sciences held for the first ...time entirely online in October 2020. A total of 81 papers presented at the conference have been submitted for possible publication in TNS. The conference accepted 57 papers as oral and 171 as poster presentations in various tracks. More information on this can be found on the conference website and in the foreword of the Conference’s General Chair, Stefan Ritt.
Although various kinds of personalization cues are pervasively used on websites, previous research studies have treated web personalization primarily as a coarse-grained, monolithic block (e.g., by ...comparing personalization vs. nonpersonalization or personalization vs. privacy) rather than as a combination of salient types of personalization cues that may create-either jointly or separately-different effects on user assessments of website value. Based on the stimulus-organism-response framework, we develop a research model that proposes users' preference fit and perceived enjoyment as two key intervening mechanisms that carry over the differential effects of content and design personalization cues on users' willingness to stick to a website and to pay for website offerings. In a field experiment with 206 subjects using a real-life news aggregator website, our findings provide evidence in support of different effect paths emanating from content and design personalization cues. Furthermore, we show that the effects of content personalization cues on website stickiness and users' willingness to pay (WTP) are mediated by both preference fit and perceived enjoyment, whereas design personalization cues exert their effects on website stickiness only through perceived enjoyment. Counter to intuition, we find that a combination of content and design personalization cues is ineffective-or even counterproductive-in increasing preference fit and users' WTP above and beyond the levels generated by content cues alone. With regard to perceived enjoyment and website stickiness, however, content and design personalization cues exhibit synergistic properties indicating that the combination of both cues are more than the sum of the individual cues alone. Recommendations are provided as to how online managers and web designers can use web personalization cues to positively influence website stickiness and to strengthen their digital business model.
This research examined the influence of Internet experience and web atmospherics on consumer online behavior. It developed a model of web navigation behavior where these antecedent variables drove ...website exploratory behavior and website involvement, which in turn, drove site attitudes and pre-purchase evaluations. These relationships were tested and confirmed in the context of a pharmaceutical website. Further, men and women differed in web navigation behavior, with men engaging in less exploratory behavior and developing less website involvement than women. However, across the two sexes, entertainment, challenge, and effectiveness of information content were the key drivers of website attitudes. The findings provide several guidelines for online communication strategy.
