How Interface Design and Search Strategy Influence Children’s Search Performance and Evaluation

This chapter presents an experiment with 158 children, aged 10 to 12, in which search performance and attitudes towards an informational Website are investigated. The same Website was designed in 3 different types of interface design varying in playfulness of navigation structure and in playfulness of visual design. The type of interface design did not have an effect on children’s search performance, but it did influence children’s feelings of emotional valence and their evaluation of “goodness.” Children felt most positive about the Website with a classical navigation structure and playful aesthetics. They found the playful image map Website least good. More importantly, children’s search performance was much more effective and efficient when using the search engine than when browsing the menu. Furthermore, this chapter explores the challenge of measuring affective responses towards digital interfaces with children by presenting an elaborate evaluation of different methods.

Usability and Accessibility of E-Health Websites

This chapter describes a multi-group research study of the usability evaluation and consequent results from participants’ experiences with the MyPryamidTracker.gov Website application. The authors report on a study of a sample consisting of 25 low-income participants with varied levels of vision (i.e., sighted, low vision, and blind Internet users). Usability was assessed via both objective and subjective measures. Overall, participants had significant difficulty understanding how to use the MyPyramidTracker.gov Website. The chapter concludes with major recommendations pertaining to the implementation of Website design elements including pathway/navigation, search, links, text chunking, and frames layout. An extensive set of actionable Website design recommendations and a usability questionnaire are also provided that can be used by researchers in their future evaluations of Websites and Web services.

Customer Satisfaction Evaluation for Greek Online Travel Agencies

The rapid development of tourist supply and demand makes Information Technologies (IT) significant, and thus, they increasingly play a more critical role in tourism marketing, distribution, promotion, and coordination. IT influences the strategic management and marketing of contemporary organisations as a paradigm-shift is experienced, transforming the best business practices globally. IT is one of the main key influences of competitiveness in the tourism/travel industry. The original purpose for adopting IT systems was simply to provide an automatic means of store and manage data (e.g. on flights and accommodation). At the same time, IT in the tourist sector enables an increased volume of transactions to be handled rapidly and effectively. This chapter presents an original customer satisfaction survey in the Greek Online Travel Agencies. For the collection of the data, a Website questionnaire was used in order to better record the customers’ views on the service overall as well as their satisfaction levels on particular aspects of the service. The survey was conducted within the period September – November 2012. Final input data consists of 510 questionnaires.

Evaluating Destination Marketing Organizations’ Websites

Developing their e-marketing strategy, Destination Marketing Organizations (DMOs) invest in the establishment of their Websites to provide extended accessibility, real-time information/services, and personalization capabilities. This chapter aims to review prior tourism studies that refer to Website evaluation by taking DMOs’ Websites as the focus of the investigation. A comprehensive literature review on theories, models, and surveys on evaluating tourism Websites is presented and analyzed. The major benefit of this study is the digest of multiple approaches regarding DMOs’ Website evaluation within the tourism sector. The chapter gives an integrated overview of the historical development of Website evaluation studies in the tourism field in order to draw conclusions about the dimensions and key factors that drive Website success. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the DMOs’ Websites of five Mediterranean countries are assessed through content analysis in terms of information, communication, transaction, relationship, and technical merit dimensions based on a modified approach of the ICTRT model (Li & Wang, 2010). The research findings should be of interest to DMOs as the findings shed light on the effectiveness of their Websites over a period of time facilitating continuous improvements and comparisons between competitive tourism destinations/countries.

User Page Reviews in Usability Testing

Websites increasingly encourage users to provide comments on the quality of specific pages by clicking on a feedback button and filling out a feedback form. The authors investigate users’ (N=153) abilities to provide such feedback and the kind of feedback that is the result. They compare the results of these so called user page review methods with the concurrent think-aloud method, applied on the same Websites. Results show that it is important to keep feedback tools both simple and attractive so that users will be able and willing to provide feedback. The authors also find that the number of problem detections is higher in the review condition, but the two methods seem to be highly complementary. An analysis of the detections from a practice-oriented perspective reveals that the overlap between the two methods is rather high and that reviewing participants seem capable of signalling important problems that are also exposed in a think-aloud study.

Pharma in the Web

In the context of intensified business competition and globalization of markets, the strategic use of the Internet in e-commerce can provide a business advantage. The research scope was the evaluation and benchmarking of pharmaceutical companies’ Websites in Greece, in order to draw conclusions about the level of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) use and specifically the ways they become active in e-business. For the evaluation of the Websites, the authors used scientifically acceptable criteria suited to the business sector of our research. From the survey, it was unveiled that pharmaceutical companies operating in Greece have a rather limited Web presence. Specifically, out of the 112 pharmaceutical companies, only 60 have developed their own Website with the multinationals to be more active. In addition, the majority of the pharmaceutical companies’ Websites provide business information but limited additional information and interactive features to potential users. In conclusion, the pharmaceutical industry in Greece must undergo critical steps to further obtain an anthropocentric approach that the global pharmaceuticals sector has already begun to adopt.

Estimating User Loyalty in Social Networking Services

In the last few years, customer loyalty for products and services has become an object of extensive studies from researchers of various scientific fields. Its importance is justified from the fact that, in many cases, particularly in strong competition conditions, measuring customer satisfaction does not provide a reliable quality performance indicator for business organizations. According to recent research, loyalty is defined as a positive level of customers’ commitment, which should not be based only in previous purchases (repeated or not) of a product/service. This chapter presents the development of a multicriteria methodology aiming at measuring user loyalty in social networking services and estimating the importance of influencing factors. In this context, a multicriteria analysis approach is adopted in order to measure user loyalty, assuming that the overall commitment depends on a number of criteria. The applied multicriteria approach is based on the UTADIS method, and the presented results confirm the strong relation between user satisfaction and loyalty. The results, however, reveal also that satisfaction is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for customer loyalty.

Developing, Implementing, and Evaluating a Web Interface in the Field of E-Government

For the purpose of good and trustworthy management of information for the government, responsible for the justice domain, the research institute was requested to build a monitor that makes it possible to periodically monitor data flows within as well as between organizations of the justice domain. The aim of this monitor is to get insight into the performance and possible bottlenecks in the criminal justice domain. An important component of the monitor is a Web interface. The Web interface should be user friendly and, more importantly, facilitate policy makers to interpret the data flows in the justice domain. To meet with this facilitation, the authors created a fixed set of variables for the interface that minimizes misinterpretation of the data. In this chapter, they describe how they managed to develop and implement the Web interface. Additionally, the authors illustrate how the Web interface works in practice and describe how they managed to evaluate the Web interface on usefulness and satisfaction.

Achieving Useful Government Accountability and Transparency Websites

With the transition from government to e-government, greater transparency in government accountability has occurred. However, state government budgets and performance reports are voluminous and difficult to understand by the average citizen. There is a need for government Websites to promote public trust while providing understandable, meaningful, and usable government accountability information. The public needs to have access to information that links the outcome of government spending so that government can be accountable for their spending. There are three fundamental functions for government: accountability, budgeting, and policy-making. The chapter discusses literature specifically relating to government accountability resulting in a checklist being developed to provide a mechanism for evaluation of government Websites from a technical and usability perspective. Therefore, it is not only important for a Website to have the government accountability information but to also display it in a useful and meaningful format understandable by citizens accessing the Website.

Web Service Evaluation Using Probabilistic Models

Information system users, administrators, and designers are all interested in performance evaluation since their goal is to obtain or provide the highest performance at the lowest cost. This goal has resulted in continuing evolution of higher performance and lower cost systems leading to today’s proliferation of workstations and personal computers, many of which have better performance than earlier supercomputers. As the variety of Web services applications (Websites) increases, it gets more important to have a set of evaluation criteria that should evaluate the performance of their effectiveness. Based on those criteria, the quality of the services that the Web applications are providing could be analysed. This work represents software metrics that could (or need) be used to quantify the quality of the information that the Web services are providing. These measures could be useful to understand problematic frameworks during the implementation of the Websites and could lead to solutions preventing those problems.