Web Content Delivery Optimization

Milliseconds matters, when they’re counted. If we consider the life of the universe into one single year, then on 31 December at 11:59:59.5 PM, “speed” was transportation’s concern, and now after 500 milliseconds it is web’s, and no one knows whose concern it would be in coming milliseconds, but at this very moment; this thesis proposes an optimization method, mainly for content delivery on slow connections. The method utilizes a proxy as a middle box to fetch the content; requested by a client, from a single or multiple web servers, and bundles all of the fetched image content types that fits into the bundling policy; inside a JavaScript file in Base64 format. This optimization method reduces the number of HTTP requests between the client and multiple web servers as a result of its proposed bundling solution, and at the same time optimizes the HTTP compression efficiency as a result of its proposed method of aggregative textual content compression. Page loading time results of the test web pages; which were specially designed and developed to capture the optimum benefits of the proposed method; proved up to 81% faster page loading time for all connection types. However, other tests in non-optimal situations such as webpages which use “Lazy Loading” techniques, showed just 35% to 50% benefits, that is only achievable on 2G and 3G connections (0.2 Mbps – 15 Mbps downlink) and not faster connections

The consumer engagement-interactivity link : an e-retailing perspective

An increasingly turbulent and unpredictable consumer landscape is posing unprecedented challenges for the modern marketer. Faced with a highly fragmented and cynical consumer base, aggressive competitive strategies, a constantly evolving digital and cyber world, and economic volatility characterising the modern macro environment, marketers are under increasing pressure to align their strategic positioning with “consumer hearts and minds”. Compounding this rise in consumer complexity is the development and salience of dual and multiple consumer identities, largely as a result of the growth in online and social media communities. Against this backdrop the Marketing Science Institute (MSI), the global voice and agenda setting body for marketing research priorities, has proposed placing consumer engagement (CE) at the forefront of marketing strategy, identifying the need to understand how to engage through innovation and design.Whilst academics and practitioners alike have acknowledged the importance of consumer engagement, describing it as the ‘holy grail’ for unlocking consumer behaviour, there is still a lack of consensus as to its conceptualisation and therefore its relationship with other marketing constructs. The salience of the online and digital consumer further compounds the difficulty in formulating a CE framework that is integrative and cross contextual. For instance, the construct of interactivity has considerable overlap with CE when applied to the online and digital domain.This study therefore moves away from the predominantly adopted exploratory approach to CE investigation, to provide empirical research into consumer engagement’s conceptualisation online and clarify the nature of the relationship between CE and interactivity. A post-positivist critical realist ontology was used to guide the research process, with the initial qualitative stage conducting twenty-eight semi-structured interviews - nine with consumers, eight with academics and eleven with marketing and communications practitioners, possessing online and digital expertise. The subsequent main quantitative phase then surveyed 600 online UK consumers, yielding 496 usable responses. Interview data suggested the centricity of emotional, cognitive and behavioural dimensions in consumer engagement’s structure; highlighted the antecedent nature of interactivity in developing CE online; and identified potential moderators to the CE-interactivity relationship. The framework developed for quantitative validation was therefore based on these initial findings. The survey data was subject to exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, structural equation modelling, satisfaction of goodness of fit indices, reliability and validity testing, and rival model comparison.The most pertinent finding of this research is establishing the CE-interactivity link; with the interactivity constructs of customisation, communication, control and speed of response all being found to be antecedents of CE, in order of influence. The findings also confirm consumer engagement’s multi-dimensionality; highlighting the online CE facets to be emotional CE (emotion and experience) and cognitive & behavioural CE (learning & insight and co-creation). Gender, satisfaction & trust and tolerance are also identified as moderating factors in the CE-interactivity relationship. Contributions are made through investigation of consumer engagement in the e-retailing context; providing further insight into CE’s relationship within a nomological network of already established relationship marketing constructs; large scale quantitative validation of the proposed CE-interactivity framework; and through a multi-stakeholder approach to data collection, helping to bridge the academic-practitioner divide (Gambetti et al., 2012). The investigation concludes with an in-depth discussion about the managerial implications, as well as providing an overview of the studies key limitations, contributions and recommendations for future research

Relationship between a football club and its fans through the club website : study about Sporting Clube de Portugal

Mestrado em Gestão de Sistemas de InformaçãoO aumento da competitividade entre as empresas que focam a sua actividade num determinado negócio faz com que as empresas tenham necessidade de se expandir por vários pontos do globo à procura de outros mercados. Os websites são uma forma de uma empresa se dar a conhecer, de divulgar o seu negócio e um bom meio de obtenção de sucesso se o website transmitir uma boa imagem da empresa. Os clubes de futebol, sendo o futebol o desporto rei em grande parte do mundo, têm uma grande oportunidade de se darem a conhecer através de um website que esteja bem construído e que atraia os utilizadores. O objectivo deste trabalho foi perceber que tipo de relação existe entre os adeptos do Sporting Clube de Portugal e o clube através do website oficial, tendo em conta as características que devem estar presentes no website. A partir da característica "Relacionamento com o utilizador" observou-se que os adeptos não dão grande importância à empatia criada pela visita ao website e dão mais importância ao conteúdo e informação presente.The increased competition between companies that focus their activities in a particular business makes companies have a need to expand for several points of the globe in searching of other markets. The websites are a way for a company to make known to in the world, to publicize their business and a way to getting success if it reflect a good image. Football clubs, exploiting the fact that football be the king sport in much of the world, have a great opportunity to get to known through a website that is well built and attract users. The aim of this work was to understand what kind of relationship exists between the fans and Sporting Clube de Portugal through the club's official website, taking into account the features that should be present in a website. From the feature "Relationship with the user" can be noticed that the fans do not give great importance to the empathy created when visiting the website of Sporting and give importance to the content and information presented

ENHANCING USERS’ EXPERIENCE WITH SMART MOBILE TECHNOLOGY

The aim of this thesis is to investigate mobile guides for use with smartphones. Mobile guides have been successfully used to provide information, personalisation and navigation for the user. The researcher also wanted to ascertain how and in what ways mobile guides can enhance users' experience. This research involved designing and developing web based applications to run on smartphones. Four studies were conducted, two of which involved testing of the particular application. The applications tested were a museum mobile guide application and a university mobile guide mapping application. Initial testing examined the prototype work for the ‘Chronology of His Majesty Sultan Haji Hassanal Bolkiah’ application. The results were used to assess the potential of using similar mobile guides in Brunei Darussalam’s museums. The second study involved testing of the ‘Kent LiveMap’ application for use at the University of Kent. Students at the university tested this mapping application, which uses crowdsourcing of information to provide live data. The results were promising and indicate that users' experience was enhanced when using the application. Overall results from testing and using the two applications that were developed as part of this thesis show that mobile guides have the potential to be implemented in Brunei Darussalam’s museums and on campus at the University of Kent. However, modifications to both applications are required to fulfil their potential and take them beyond the prototype stage in order to be fully functioning and commercially viable

Website speed testing analysis using speedtesting model

Page load speed reflects the website´s performance. It has a significant influence on user experience and satisfaction. In this work we study and analyze the reasons cause the slowness of webpages load speed. By the deep investigation of the related literature and the review of websites speed testing services from different perspectives such as functions, interface and additional settings. We present a detailed recommendations that can be followed to optimize site's performance. Our hypotheses about reliability of website speed testing has been tested and conformed experimentally. 378 individual speed tests with various combinations of settings experiments have been performed to confirm out hypotheses, and recommendations have been provided based on our results. We believe that following these rules would ensure significantly more reliable website speed testing in comparison with a common practic

Customers’ Online Interaction Experiences with Fashion Brands: E-Information and E-Buying

Online platforms (such as websites, blogs, social networks, crowdsourcing) enable consumers to interact with companies and brands in new ways. This chapter is the first attempt to go further and analyse how perceived fashion website quality, social influence and recommendation, credibility, and experience influence fashion consumer behaviour, considering performance expectancy as the core element of online trust, satisfaction and word-of-mouth. The proposed model is tested in the context of the fashion industry. Data comprises a sample of generation Y users of fashion websites to get information and buy clothes. In order to collect data, convenience mall-intercept sampling (Lisbon city centre area) served to draw a broad cross-section of consumers. Researchers used tablets to be used by consumers to answer the online survey. The final sample consisted of 312 participants. The instruments employed were adapted from previous studies and pilot-tested with a group of master’s students to verify the clarity of meaning and comprehension. Findings reveal the stronger influence of perceived quality and experience on the performance expectancy. Performance expectancy, in turn, exercises a positive effect on satisfaction and word-of-mouth

Web Tracking: Mechanisms, Implications, and Defenses

This articles surveys the existing literature on the methods currently used by web services to track the user online as well as their purposes, implications, and possible user's defenses. A significant majority of reviewed articles and web resources are from years 2012-2014. Privacy seems to be the Achilles' heel of today's web. Web services make continuous efforts to obtain as much information as they can about the things we search, the sites we visit, the people with who we contact, and the products we buy. Tracking is usually performed for commercial purposes. We present 5 main groups of methods used for user tracking, which are based on sessions, client storage, client cache, fingerprinting, or yet other approaches. A special focus is placed on mechanisms that use web caches, operational caches, and fingerprinting, as they are usually very rich in terms of using various creative methodologies. We also show how the users can be identified on the web and associated with their real names, e-mail addresses, phone numbers, or even street addresses. We show why tracking is being used and its possible implications for the users (price discrimination, assessing financial credibility, determining insurance coverage, government surveillance, and identity theft). For each of the tracking methods, we present possible defenses. Apart from describing the methods and tools used for keeping the personal data away from being tracked, we also present several tools that were used for research purposes - their main goal is to discover how and by which entity the users are being tracked on their desktop computers or smartphones, provide this information to the users, and visualize it in an accessible and easy to follow way. Finally, we present the currently proposed future approaches to track the user and show that they can potentially pose significant threats to the users' privacy.Comment: 29 pages, 212 reference

Effect and Consequence e-Customer Satisfaction for e-Commerce Users

The 4.0 industrial revolution has changed people's behavior to use everything through technology. This happens also in terms of shopping that can be done by many people through e-commerce. This study aims to examine the effect of online convenience, website design, security, information quality, and e-service quality on e-word of mouth, behavioral intentions, and e-loyalty through e-customer satisfaction respondents who use e-commerce to shop at Indonesia, especially Surabaya. The data used in this study are primary data obtained through distributing questionnaires to 205 respondents who are male and female e-commerce users, who are at least 15 years old, and have conducted transactions in e-commerce at least 5 times in the past year. The sampling technique in this study is non-probability sampling. This research uses a quantitative approach using statistical testing. The test was carried out using the Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) method with the SMART-PLS 3.0 program. The results of this study indicate that only online convenience, security, and information quality have an influence on other dependent variables through e-customer satisfaction, while website design and e-service quality have no effec

Corporate E-banking: A Study based on DeLone and McLean’s IS Success Model

Although there are ample of studies dealing with retail internet banking, very few studies have investigated corporate internet banking. The objective of the current research is to study the determinants of the intention to continue use online banking of the existing corporate customers. This study collected data from 154 customers of an international bank to test a model developed from the DeLone and McLean’s IS success model. The results show that system quality contributes most to the perception of overall quality of the corporate e-banking service as well as the impact on the future use intention. Other factors that are found to be important are human service quality, information quality, and accuracy and security of the system