"In Web We Trust": Establishing Strategic Trust Among Online Customers

Electronic commerce (e-commerce) provides an important chance for established large companies to gain more customers as well as for new small companies to have a good start and rapid growth. Persuading customers to return to an e-commerce site is even more important than attracting them in the first place. Establishing trust between customers and companies through web interface is not as easy as through human-buyer-human-seller interaction. In the past few years, a number of experiments have been conducted in order to determine the factors that influence customers' trust in online businesses. The goal of our experiment was to establish which features that appear on commercial websites are trust-inducing. Our study focused on three independent variables: customer service, testimonial (self and third party) and security features representation (graphics and text). We designed the homepages of eight web sites with different combinations of treatments of the three independent variables. Each of the 52 subjects reviewed all the eight homepages and gave each of them a relative rank of trustworthiness. After the experiment subjects answered additional e-trust related questions. The results of our experiment and the survey show that all three features that we tested are important in establishing strategic trust among on-line customers.

Navigation Bars for Hierarchical Web Sites

Navigation bars are those handy sets of links that many websites employ to keep users on the right track. They help users browse and search information as well as provide paths back up the web hierarchy. The goal of our study was to determine the effectiveness of the selection list navigation bar, an innovation to the standard navigation bar. Eighteen subjects searched web site structures to find answers to multiple choice questions using control (single link back to the home page), standard (a list of links back to each page in the path), and selection list (a list of lists of links to each page in the path and each of their siblings) styles of navigation bars. We found that after a short amount of use, subjects could significantly reduce the number page loads necessary to find an answer using the selection lists, but could not significantly reduce the amount of time necessary.

The Menu Design and Navigational Efficiency of the E-Maryland Portal

Web site navigation has become a significant issue in web usability. As the information load of the Internet continues to grow, it becomes difficult to find the target information sought by the user. As a case study, we examine the E-Maryland site to determine the usability of the site’s menus and site navigational structure. Several issues are considered. The original main portal into the site contains an interactive menu where the icons react to mouse over interactions. However, studies have shown that a static index is more efficient for expert Internet users. Another issue of navigational efficiency involves the structure of the site. Currently, the site has a deep structure, where most of the links are about four levels from the index. The study includes the original version, a static index menu and narrow, deep structure version, and a static index with a broad, shallow structure version. The time it takes to find a specified link is used as a performance metric. In this study of 24 subjects, the results from the static index with a broad structure version of the E-Maryland site were statistically significant and indicated that this version produced the lowest search times. However, users preferred the visual appeal of the original version.

Searching for Airline Tickets: A Comparison of Tabular and Graphical Presentations

With the emergence of online travel sites, many individuals are purchasing airline tickets over the internet. The airline flight information provided by these sites are usually displayed in textual tabular format and sorted in ascending order by their prices. However, many researchers suggest that visualizing data with a temporal layout such as a timeline is a common and effective means to present such data. This experiment studied the effectiveness of two temporal data presentation strategies (Tabular vs. Graphical) for air tickets. The twenty subjects in the experiment were split into two groups. Results show that user performance speed for the search tasks and the recall tests favored the graphical presentation. There were very few errors with either presentation. Subjective preferences were the same for both presentations. The outcome of this study confirms our belief in the benefits of listing air tickets by graphical presentation than by tabular presentation. Graphical presentation can provide information in a more compact form, producing faster user performance and better user retention.