Multi-dimensional Scaling of User Preferences on Website use

As the number of internet websites increases explosively, the user satisfaction for the website design should also be stressed. Since the user preference for the website design is diverse according to the characteristics and contents of those websites, it is of importance to examine how the user preference, or so-called, sensibility, varies according to the perceptual image of the website design. The purpose of the study is to analyze user's perceptual preference on the website design with regard to the website categories using the multi-dimensional scaling method. In this study, nine categories of websites were selected. The factor analysis was conducted for the adjectives related to perceptual preferences of the website and ten factors were drawn from the results. A questionnaire survey was then performed for forty university students and their preferences for each website category were analyzed using the same method. The results showed that the perceptual image or map of user preferences on the website design is mainly consisted mainly of three dimensions and revealed the distinguished features according to the website categories.