This chapter reviews theories of Web interface designs. Through examining TRA, TAM, and HCI/Usability, their strengths and limitations are identified. For the Web site interface design, TAM and HCI/Usability are two most applicable theories. HCI shares the goal of achieving high usability for users. Usability includes ease of use plus usefulness, which is articulated by TAM theory. TAM yields consistently high-explained variance for why users use/accept systems.
This chapter also identifies and pools together four sets of factors influencing Web site quality, which in turn affects customers’ perceptions, preferences, and intensions. These concepts and factors can be useful for researchers to study relationships between Web site quality and its related constructs. These factors and measures also have significant meaning for e-commerce Web site designers and managers. An attractive e-commerce Web site starts with quality information. The information provided in the Web site has to be accurate, informative, updated, and relevant to customers’ needs.
A successful Web site not only contains sufficient and quality information, but also is user friendly. A Web site should have a search facility which helps users to maintain a mental map of the site and responds to the users’ search quickly. Furthermore, it is necessary not only to protect the purchasers ethically and legally (i.e., trust), but also to provide caring and individualized information to customers (i.e., empathy). Besides, a superior e-commerce Web site also has an emotional dimension — attractor, which brings a human touch to the site. It is a significant factor to attract visitors to revisit the site.
In designing an e-commerce Web site, a designer should consider not only the software components, but also the capability of hardware. A Web user is likely to redirect the Web browser to another Web site if the page that he/she tries to access is not fully loaded within a tolerable length of time. For this reason, Clyde (2000) suggests online pages should be kept simple with limited use of graphics. This conflicts with the multi-media information requirements, and also limits the advancement of true two-way communications (Banks, 1997). Therefore, besides using simple graphics, the speed of the hardware supporting the Web site also needs to be considered.
In designing an e-commerce Web site, a more effective approach, which has been used in a limited way on the Web, is to see from the customers’ perceptions (Katz et al., 1991; Weinberg, 2000). The physical design elements (i.e., type of information, links, layout, appearance, etc.) are important but insufficient; it is the customers’ perception of a Web site that makes differences. For example, if a Web user perceives the loading time of a Web site to be intolerable, the user will direct the Web browser elsewhere and potentially, will not purchase any of the products. However, in circumstances where the feedback is provided during the loading, the tolerance of delay is significantly higher (e.g., an icon that indicates the proportion of information that has been loaded appears near the bottom of a Web browser).
Since trading partner trust or interpersonal trust is difficult to create for online B2C customers, the Web designer/managers should actively create an environment to enhance trust from a technological perspective. E-commerce vendors should adhere to technical standards, security procedures, and protection mechanisms that are conducive to supporting transactions. Trust can be enhanced by such mechanisms as digital signatures, encryptions, authorizations, and best business practices (Pavlou, 2001). Such mechanisms can facilitate customers’ confident expectations toward a favorable outcome of the transactions in regards to the uncertainty of the technology infrastructure and control mechanisms.
In summary, for Web site developers and managers, the following guidelines are suggested: (1) Evaluate existing similar sites to gain insights into the behavior of a system and its users; (2) Compare design alternatives to determine the most efficient interface layout and the best representation; (3) Use the factors/measures developed in this chapter so that the usability goals can be specified quantitatively and competing alternatives can be compared; and (4) Check for conformance to interface style standards with proper design techniques.