The Effect of Religious Identity on User Judgment of Website Quality

Part 1: Long and Short PapersInternational audienceThe paper investigates the effect of users’ religious identity on their judgments of website quality. Websites related to Islamic and Christian identities were evaluated by Christian and Muslim respondents. Aesthetics, usability, service quality, pleasurable interaction, content, website identity and overall judgment were assessed, showing that respondents were more positive to the website which related to their own belief but the effect was stronger with the Muslim sample. Interviews were conducted to support the above results with a non-religious well known branded website added. Respondents provided consistent evaluations preferring the website matching their beliefs but brand identity showed to be more important than the religious identity

Are First Impressions about Websites Only Related to Visual Appeal?

Part 2: Long and Short PapersInternational audienceThis paper investigates whether immediate impression about websites influences only perceptions of attractiveness. The evaluative constructs of perceived usability, credibility and novelty were investigated alongside visual appeal in an experimental setting in which users evaluated 20 website screenshots in two phases. The websites were rated by the participants after viewing time of 500 ms in the first phase and with no time limit in the second. Within-website and within-rater consistency were examined in order to determine whether extremely short time period are enough to quickly form stable opinions about high level evaluative constructs besides visual appeal. We confirmed that quick and stable visual appeal judgments were made without the need of elaborate investigations and found evidence that this is also true for novelty. Usability and credibility judgments were found less consistent but nonetheless noteworthy

Does Branding Need Web Usability? A Value-Oriented Empirical Study

Does usability of a web-based communication artifact affect brand, i.e., the set of beliefs, emotions, attitudes, or qualities that people mentally associate to the entity behind that artifact? Intuitively, the answer is "yes": usability is a fundamental aspect of the quality of the experience with a website, and a "good" experience with a "product" or its reifications tends to translate into "good" brand perception. To date, however, the existence of a connection between web usability and brand perception is shown through anecdotic arguments, and is not supported by published systematic research. This paper discusses a study that empirically investigates this correlation in a more rigorous, analytical, and replicable way. Our main contribution is twofold: on the one hand, we provide empirical evidence to the heuristic principle that web usability influences branding, and we do that through four between subjects controlled experiments that involved 120 subjects. On the other hand, we inform the study with a systematic value-oriented approach to the user experience, and thus provide a conceptual framework that can be reused in other experimental settings, either for replicating our study, or for designing similar studies focusing on the correlation of web branding vs. design factors other than usability

Semi-Supervised Learning based Aesthetic Classifier for Short Animations Embedded in Web Pages

Abstract. We propose a semi-supervised learning based computational model for aesthetic classification of short animation videos, which are nowadays part of many web pages. The proposed model is expected to be useful in developing an overall aesthetic model of web pages, leading to better evaluation of web page usability. We identified two feature sets describing aesthetics of an animated video. Based on the feature sets, we developed a Naïve-Bayes classifier by applying Co-training, a semi-supervised machine learning technique. The model classifies the videos as good, average or bad in terms of their aesthetic quality. We designed 18 videos and got those rated by 17 participants for use as the initial training set. Another set of 24 videos were designed and labeled using Co-training. We conducted an empirical study with 16 videos and 23 participants to ascertain the efficacy of the proposed model. The study results show 75 % model accuracy

Webpage Designs for Diverse Cultures: An Exploratory Study of User Preferences in China

Abstract. A wealth of studies has revealed a cross-cultural difference in the user preference on webpage designs. Users from other cultures often criticize a widely accepted webpage design in one culture. Designs for diverse cultures are thus expected to be specific to address diverse user preferences. This study investigated the preferences of Chinese users on four essential design elements related to the readability of texts of the result pages of search engines. The results suggested that the search result pages of the Bing search engine designed for typical „US users ‟ did not satisfy Chinese users. Chinese users, in general, preferred huge-sized texts for titles, a more compact layout of the search result pages, and keywords to be highlighted in red. The findings of the study contributed to webpage design guidelines for Chinese users, and may serve as a catalyst in exploring user preferences in designing for diverse cultures