A Comprehensive, Parsimonious, Process-Oriented Model for Web User Experience

Numerous attempts have been made to understand how consumers conceptualize their Web experience. Given the multidisciplinary nature of the Web, these efforts have led to “the blind man and the elephant effect.” For instance, because system designers view the Web as a collection of hardware and software, information systems theories and the corresponding metrics of Web user experience are dominated by a rather narrow (from consumers’ view point) usability orientation. Marketers, in contrast, consider the Web as a branding and communications vehicle; yet their efforts are either devoted to advance atheoretical metrics [1] or are relatively narrow in scope, such as focusing on peak user experience (e.g., [2] [3]). It is only recently that there has been an attempt to develop models that are grounded in broad, multidisciplinary theories (e.g., [4] [5]) that answer a fundamental question: How do users conceptualize, comprehend, interpret, or assign meaning to Web pages/sites? That is, how do users make sense of Web pages, and why do they react to them as they do? We propose a comprehensive, yet parsimonious, meta model that transcends several narrower Web behavior models proposed in advertising, information systems, and marketing. Because molar events cannot always be understood by their constituent parts alone, our model focuses on the perception at the molar (totality of user experience) and, not molecular level. With miner modifications, therefore, it applies to the perception of both Web pages and Web sites, a sign of its robustness and generalizability, The Model The fundamental premises of our model are: (1) the initial perception of a Web page/site involves understanding or making sense of the content and its organization on the page/site it (what is it, and what does it do for me?); (2) these early attention and interpretational processes of perceiving give rise to positive and negative affective reactions (or feelings 1 ), of which people are aware (i.e., they consciously monitor them) and which serve as causal antecedents that influence the evaluation of specific aspects of a Web page/site (e.g., attractive, lively, ugly), and its global evaluation (i.e., the overall attitude toward the Web page/site). The hypothesized model is presented in the attached Figure. Sample measures for the constructs are in Table. In this context, it is worth noting that our model explicitly incorporates users’ feelings as causal antecedents to evaluations, attitudes, and behaviors. This is commensurate with the prevailing scientific view that affect is a highly organized, systematic response to environmental demands that has evolved to serve adaptive roles and that, to understand people’s judgments, we must understand their affective responses ([6] [7]). Undergraduate students at a Midwestern university were the study participants. The product category selected was electronic cards. This is a relevant category for the students. The participants viewed a web page and responded to 1 Affective responses, usually defined as valenced feeling states [8], run whole gamut from mild, transient, general, and pervasive moods to more intense emotions such as anger or fear. Appraisals, in contrast, are cognitive or evaluative responses or semantic judgments that represent a respondent’s praise or criticism of the characteristics of the target itself [9]. The two are qualitatively different; the latter is an appraisal, and the former is a phenomenological property of the person or a state engendered in the respondent [10]. Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Electronic Business 2008