University Homepage Affordances: The Influence of Hyperlinks on Perceptions of Source Credibility

The technology affordances of university website homepages were evaluated to inform the development of prototypical examples of accessible public university and exclusive private university homepages. Affordances are characteristic of the environment that, when perceived, afford or provide opportunities for action (Gibson, 1986). In addition, affordances, such as hyperlinks, also prompt heuristic processes that lead to judgments that are based on peripheral cues rather than substantive information. Integrating the MAIN model (Sundar, 2008) and the Two-Factor Theory (Herzberg, 1966; Zhang & Von Dran, 2000), eye tracking and survey methodology were used to assess differences in perception and credibility judgments of the prototypes developed to represent the website homepages of accessible and exclusive universities. A content analysis was used to assess hyperlinks and other design features of the website homepages of the 10 most accessible and 10 most exclusive Ohio universities. Consistent with prior research, results indicated relatively little variation among the hyperlinks and design elements of university website homepages. The features were used to develop prototypes representative of the two types of university homepages. Those prototypes served as the manipulated independent variable in an experiment and, although the manipulation was correctly perceived, the differences were not statistically significant. Correspondingly, the credibility measures, although consistent with theoretical predictions, were not statistically significant based on the type of prototype viewed. This study thus did not provide evidence of a relationship between number of hyperlinks and credibility. Perceived hygiene and motivator factors however, were significantly positively associated with credibility, consistent with two-factor theory. Additionally, prior experience, particularly with university websites, was associated with the extent to which credibility assessments were not neutral. Participants with more experience were significantly more likely to make non-neutral assessments of credibility than those with less experience, results which are consistent with theory underlying the MAIN model and provide evidence of heuristic processing. This work provides evidence that two-factor theory complements the MAIN model, with potential theoretical and practical benefits. Universities can apply them to develop websites that better meet with user expectations and are thus perceived more favorably

Examining the interaction between consumer personality and homepage content.

The experimental study investigated the interactions between homepage content and consumer personality based on an original conception of consumer online processing. The empirical findings enable homepage designers to frame communication messages with appeals to particular consumer personality segments, resulting in better message strategies

The Usefulness of Multi-Sensor Affect Detection on User Experience: An Application of Biometric Measurement Systems on Online Purchasing

abstract: Traditional usability methods in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) have been extensively used to understand the usability of products. Measurements of user experience (UX) in traditional HCI studies mostly rely on task performance and observable user interactions with the product or services, such as usability tests, contextual inquiry, and subjective self-report data, including questionnaires, interviews, and usability tests. However, these studies fail to directly reflect a user’s psychological involvement and further fail to explain the cognitive processing and the related emotional arousal. Thus, capturing how users think and feel when they are using a product remains a vital challenge of user experience evaluation studies. Conversely, recent research has revealed that sensor-based affect detection technologies, such as eye tracking, electroencephalography (EEG), galvanic skin response (GSR), and facial expression analysis, effectively capture affective states and physiological responses. These methods are efficient indicators of cognitive involvement and emotional arousal and constitute effective strategies for a comprehensive measurement of UX. The literature review shows that the impacts of sensor-based affect detection systems to the UX can be categorized in two groups: (1) confirmatory to validate the results obtained from the traditional usability methods in UX evaluations; and (2) complementary to enhance the findings or provide more precise and valid evidence. Both provided comprehensive findings to uncover the issues related to mental and physiological pathways to enhance the design of product and services. Therefore, this dissertation claims that it can be efficient to integrate sensor-based affect detection technologies to solve the current gaps or weaknesses of traditional usability methods. The dissertation revealed that the multi-sensor-based UX evaluation approach through biometrics tools and software corroborated user experience identified by traditional UX methods during an online purchasing task. The use these systems enhanced the findings and provided more precise and valid evidence to predict the consumer purchasing preferences. Thus, their impact was “complementary” on overall UX evaluation. The dissertation also provided information of the unique contributions of each tool and recommended some ways user experience researchers can combine both sensor-based and traditional UX approaches to explain consumer purchasing preferences.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Human Systems Engineering 201

Investigating website usability and behavioural intention for online hotel reservations: a cognitive perspective

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.The problem area identified for this research is to define the cognitive factors and Customers’ Critical Information Requirements (CCIRs) that affect the customer decision making process when they book their hotel reservations online. The purpose of this study is to define the CCIRs and the (re)design specifications of the website which will be noticed by the users through to completing the booking, without losing them during the decision making process. A combination of various cognitive analysis and eyetracking techniques were applied in order to understand in real time the customer’s decision making process during their online hotel booking process. This includes methods that identify user’s online previous and present experiences, methods that assess and result in the specification of usability and (re)design guidelines. Techniques for eliciting CCIRs in real time are facilitated through the simultaneous usage of eye tracking technology, think aloud expression and video recording. Finally, a validation study was conducted in order to confirm the research findings. A key outcome of this research is a novel, robust and precision approach that (i) combines cognitive task analysis, eye tracking techniques, statistical and clustering methods in order to facilitate the precise identification of both explicit and tacit CCIRs; (ii) for the first time provides a time frame analysis of CCIRs across each stage of the customer’s decision making process and identifies the concomitant decision points where the customer is most likely to abandon the web site; (iii) elicits the mental model of the customer together with the CCIRs and uses this knowledge as the basis for generating the re-design specification for the website; and, (iv) evaluates whether there is a significant improvement in the usability and cognitive utility of the redesigned website that is of practical value to hotels. A further theoretical contribution is the “CCIRs informed decision making process model” for the (re)design of hotel websites as a result of applying our novel and innovative approach. Moreover, I have demonstrated for the first time how our approach can be applied to theory building of CCIRs-based cognitive task models that explicitly define the customer’s decision making process. The above mentioned methodology and theoretical outputs of this research are generally applicable to other industry sectors beyond the hotel industry. For example, financial trading decision support systems, air traffic control displays, mobile phone apps, i.e. to name a few from the myriad of possible applications

New data analytics and visualization methods in personal data mining, cancer data analysis and sports data visualization

In this dissertation, we discuss a reading profiling system, a biological data visualization system and a sports visualization system. Self-tracking is getting increasingly popular in the field of personal informatics. Reading profiling can be used as a personal data collection method. We present UUAT, an unintrusive user attention tracking system. In UUAT, we used user interaction data to develop technologies that help to pinpoint a users reading region (RR). Based on computed RR and user interaction data, UUAT can identify a readers reading struggle or interest. A biomarker is a measurable substance that may be used as an indicator of a particular disease. We developed CancerVis for visual and interactive analysis of cancer data and demonstrate how to apply this platform in cancer biomarker research. CancerVis provides interactive multiple views from different perspectives of a dataset. The views are synchronized so that users can easily link them to a same data entry. Furthermore, CancerVis supports data mining practice in cancer biomarker, such as visualization of optimal cutpoints and cutthrough exploration. Tennis match summarization helps after-live sports consumers assimilate an interested match. We developed TennisVis, a comprehensive match summarization and visualization platform. TennisVis offers chart- graph for a client to quickly get match facts. Meanwhile, TennisVis offers various queries of tennis points to satisfy diversified client preferences (such as volley shot, many-shot rally) of tennis fans. Furthermore, TennisVis offers video clips for every single tennis point and a recommendation rating is computed for each tennis play. A case study shows that TennisVis identifies more than 75% tennis points in full time match

Website aesthetics: Does it matter? A study on effects of perception of website aesthetics, usability and content quality on online purchase intention

Master'sMASTER OF SCIENC