Walking and Rhythmicity: Sensing Urban Space

As an inescapable part of our everyday lifeworld, walking is an embodied practice with specific lived qualities. It is also a mode of experiencing place and the city,and in this context is an aesthetic and insightful spatial practice. Through everyday walking we develop a sense of (and for) place. The everyday practices of walking vary in their purpose, pace and rhythm, and nurture more or less creative and more or less critical relationships to urban space. Walkscapes are rhythmic. Walking practices are constitutive of ‘place-ballets’, as defined by David Seamon, choreographed wholes of multiple place rhythms. As such, they impact on the rhythmical continuums of urban places, influencing and suggesting their tempo. Through a review of the literature and illustrated by fieldwork, this paper takes a phenomenological stance on walking. It starts by unraveling aspects and attributes of its character and continues by focusing on the experience of walking in the city and its relationship to sense of place. It explores walking both as purposeful activity and as creative and critical spatial practice. It distinguishes between three modes of walking: the purposive, the discursive and the conceptual. All three are inherent temporal practices of place. Finally, the paper introduces walking as a temporal and rhythmical practice, part of a wider group of place-rhythms that characterize urban places. The paper concludes by highlighting the implications for the urban design discipline. It explores walking as a temporal practice to be designed for, one that may induce creative and spatially critical responses to urban places, and one that needs closer attention when design is concerned with placemaking

Multimodality as a Premise for Inducing Online Flow on a Brand Website: a Social Semiotic Approach

The aim of this paper is to propose a new approach in the form of multimodality as a semiotic method that can be used by marketers and semioticians to induce online flow, a psychological state, on a brand website. First, we refer to multimodality as a semiotic analysis that can be used for a better optimization of semiotic resource sets in meaning-making, and we distinguish it from another similar concept: multimedia. Second, after a critical literature review, we address the flow construct - a state of mind sometimes experienced by people who are deeply involved and immersed in some event, object or activity. Previous quantitative studies show a correlation between online flow experience and other variables such as design, content, sound and layout that are suggested to be its antecedents. In our study, these flow antecedents are viewed as sets of signs or modes that can be orchestrated in order to create different levels of perceived challenge for brand website users. We consider that multimodality can be used for a better optimization of these various meanings as expressed by modes that are "essentially different in nature" (Bateman, 2008, p.54). Also, we refer to the online marketing outcomes of the online flow experience, in order to outline its importance and its implications in the online environment. The main conclusion of our paper is that multimodality can be used by scholars and practitioners as a premise to induce online flow on a brand website, by optimizing the sets of signs or modes. Originality – our contribution consists of an interdisciplinary approach. We use concepts from semiotics, positive psychology, and online marketing for a better understanding of how marketers and semioticians can positively influence online customer behaviour

HOW TO ADVERTISE APPROAPRIATELY ON THE WORLD WIDE WEB? A MULTI-CONGRUITY ANALYSIS APPROACH

As a popular and important advertising style, Internet advertising has drawn substantial amount of scholarly attention. Previous studies focus on the independent effects of various factors, such as product, consumer, website and ad per se, but few studies consider the impacts of the congruities between these factors on consumer’s attitude toward the ads. In this paper, we propose an integrative model, product-consumer-website-ad model, to articulate how the congruity between factors exerts its effect. We propose that ad appeal (emotional vs. informational) should be designed consistent with the nature of the advertised product (hedonic vs. utilitarian), the nature of the website (hedonic vs. utilitarian) and the thinking styles of consumer (intuitive vs. rational). Personalization plays an important role in the process to achieve the congruity. We also propose that the ad on the website with high reputation will generate more favourable attitude toward it. Implications and future research are also discussed in the paper

A Questionnaire for Assessing Immersive Websites

Web-immersion – i.e., a deep sense of cognitive and perceptual absorption engendered by the content and interactive features of a website - plays an important role in our modern, digital world. Yet, this topic has received little attention from design and HCI scholars. The lack of tools to assess and measure immersion in the Web may severely limit our ability to understand the nature of such experience, thereby constraining future research in the area. To address this issue, we designed a questionnaire for assessing immersive websites and conducted a preliminary evaluation on it. In this article, we outline the questionnaire design and report on findings from a preliminary study conducted to analyse its reliability and validity. Moreover, we present results from Factor Analysis performed to investigate the dimensionality of the instrument. Finally, we conclude by discussing the implications of our findings, along with limitations of the study and future work

An Empirical Study Of Flow Experiences In Social Network Sites

Social network sites (SNS) have simplified and amplified social interaction between online users. The unique hedonic-oriented features provide experiential motives for SNS users. Although SNS is growing popularity, a number of questions remain to be addressed concerning the usage of SNS: What are experiential motives for SNS users? What is the relationship between flow experiences and behavioural intentions within the SNS context? Given the novelty of SNS phenomenon and its unexplored potential in many fields, this study develops a conceptual model derived from reference studies on online services and social psychology. The present study proposes four flow experiences of SNS users such as perceived enjoyment, concentration, escape and social interaction to represent the multidimensional aspect of flow instead of a single dimension. To investigate the research model, this study apply structural equation mode(SEM) analysis with 342 valid replies. As a result, this empirical study indicated that perceived enjoyment was the most important flow experience with SNS, followed by escape and social interaction. Concentration was not a significant predictor of behavioral intentions toward SNS

Developing a Conceptualization of Mobile Service Quality

Mobile devices changed the way that users nowadays encounter online environments. These devices have become the essential touchpoints for users on their path to purchase. Since recent IS literature does not provide comprehensive measurements for mobile service quality (MSQ), we employed focus groups and critical incident technique to collect 422 user statements related to perceptions of service quality in mobile shopping situations. Our study explores eighteen attributes representing five essential dimensions of MSQ. The results suggest that users assess mobile stores depending on the offered ubiquity of services (e.g., mobility, location-based services), mobile store design (e.g., responsive design, synchronicity, information quality, product selection), customer service (e.g., social media, return policies), order fulfillment (e.g., process transparency, timeliness of delivery), and security/privacy. We discuss this conceptual model of MSQ which will be used to develop a comprehensive MSQ measurement in further research

Psychological elements explaining the consumer's adoption and use of a website recommendation system: A theoretical framework proposal

The purpose of this paper is to understand, with an emphasis on the psychological perspective of the research problem, the consumer's adoption and use of a certain web site recommendation system as well as the main psychological outcomes involved. The approach takes the form of theoretical modelling. Findings: A conceptual model is proposed and discussed. A total of 20 research propositions are theoretically analyzed and justified. Research limitations/implications: The theoretical discussion developed here is not empirically validated. This represents an opportunity for future research. Practical implications: The ideas extracted from the discussion of the conceptual model should be a help for recommendation systems designers and web site managers, so that they may be more aware, when working with such systems, of the psychological process consumers undergo when interacting with them. In this regard, numerous practical reflections and suggestions are presented