Two approaches for website design: The open and strongly hyperlinked structure associated with “information architecture” and a more closed approach based upon narrative techniques are compared through analysis and user observation. As a result, a hybrid approach to website design, known as the reformulated accordion structure, is suggested.

We thank Michael R. Bauer for his support. We thank Tom Lee and Kevin Steensma for their comments on an earlier version of this paper. Last but not the least, we thank Yulin Long and Qian Wang for their excellent research assistance. ABSTRACT This study provides evidence on the role played by online customer experience in acquiring traffic and converting traffic to sales in a sample of pure Int...

Existing web statistics visualization tools do not allow the user to analyze the e ectiveness of page layout and how it a ects the way in which visitors navigate through a site. We present the OSM tool for viewing link hit statistics in a perpage context, and the Parallel Page Viewer for visualizing user navigation over an entire site.

The purpose of this paper was to investigate the determinants of e-consumer productivity on a virtual store. This study drew on research dealing with consumer productivity, information retrieving and website design. A 2x2x2 online experiment with a sample of 350 participants was conducted. Results showed that e-consumer productivity depended on individual characteristics (e.g., Internet experie...

Guidelines for e-commerce website design deal well with the more objective aspects of page design, but have less to say about overall site structure and users' emotional responses. In this study we used a semiotic approach to investigate how several fashion websites provide affordances for navigation and produce affective responses. We gained some interesting insights into how users interpret t...

It is essential for hotel companies to evaluate and improve website performance in order to keep and increase their online presence and competitiveness in the marketplace. Based on the relative literature, in this article, the authors adapt the Web Assessment Index (WAI) to evaluate the attractiveness of the hotel websites. This has been validated in other studies in the literature, and measure...

When shopping for a product or searching for information on a website, it may take several attempts for consumers to find what they are looking for. It is suggested that these unsuccessful attempts to find a product or information, i.e., dead-ends, influence consumers’ perception and evaluation of the website usability. Results of this study, conducted with 204 consumers over two different site...

In this paper I discuss the common pitfalls and misconceptions assocated with designing appropriate, useable and functional websites and how the end-user is affected by these errors. Topics discussed cover both technical and non-technical aspects of this subject, including the myriad of human issues associated with the use of online resources and interfaces.

This paper proposes a tool to assist web site publishers in improving their web site design. The tool uses an analysis technique that discovers the gap between web site publisher expectations and user behavior. The former are extracted by measuring the inter-page conceptual relevance and/or link connectivity. On the other hand, the latter is extracted by measuring the inter-page access co-occur...