Website Delay, Familiarity, and Breadth

From Information Systems at Pitt Business

Waiting, waiting, waiting, almost there…

Even with high-speed internet connections being more widely available than ever before, waiting for content is still an issue as web site developers create multimedia content to consume the ever increasing bandwidth. When searching for information online the delay a user experiences, along with the sites breadth (structure), and familiarity of content (information scent) impact users’ attitudes towards using a site again and recommending it to others. Administrators looking to increase these intentions should focus on these key factors. However, due to the relationship between these factors, rather than focusing only on the impact of any one of the factors, it is important to consider the level of the other two factors. Of good news to developers is that one or more of the factors can be manipulated to compensate for difficulties in the other factors.

Website design tips for developers (from the authors)

If delay and depth appear to be problems:

• Designers should pay even more attention to the terminology used to categorize content.
• Designers should be careful when deviating from established industry norms or commonly used terms.
• In those cases when designers do choose more site-specific terminology, user testing to help determine the familiarity of site content and terminology becomes even more important.

When it is difficult or impossible to expect a reasonable amount of familiarity in target users:

• Designers can maximize breadth by providing many links per page to limit users’ trial-and-error browsing.
• Delay can be minimized by eliminating unnecessary graphic content; streamlining page design; or assuring proper server configuration, redundancy, and/or bandwidth. When the site is broadened and made faster in loading, users suffer less cost in browsing.

Designers can also be less concerned about delay:

• When familiarity is expected to be high and the site has few levels.
• In those cases, pages can be made more attractive by making use of additional graphics or more extensive underlying applications.
• The site can be made with greater depth than might otherwise have been considered.

When not concerned about delay:

• Pages can be made more attractive by making use of additional graphics or more extensive underlying applications.
• The site can be made with greater depth than might otherwise have been considered.

To read more, check out the paper on When the Wait Isn’t So Bad: The Interacting Effects of Website Delay, Familiarity, and Breadth by Dennis Galletta, Raymond M. Henry, Scott McCoy, and Peter Polak.

This article was originally published in Information Systems Research (ISR), Vol. 17, No. 1, March 2006.

[edit] Abstract

Although its popularity is widespread, the Web is well known for one particular drawback: its frequent delay when moving from one page to another. This experimental study examined whether delay and two other website design variables (site breadth and content familiarity) have interaction effects on user performance, attitudes, and behavioral intentions. The three experimental factors (delay, familiarity, and breadth) collectively impact the cognitive costs and penalties that users incur when making choices in their search for target information.

An experiment was conducted with 160 undergraduate business majors in a completely counterbalanced, fully factorial design that exposed them to two websites and asked them to browse the sites for nine pieces of information. Results showed that all three factors have strong direct impacts on performance and user attitudes, in turn affecting behavioral intentions to return to the site, as might be expected. A significant three-way interaction was found between all three factors indicating that these factors not only individually impact a user’s experiences with a website, but also act in combination to either increase or decrease the costs a user incurs. Two separate analyses support an assertion that attitudes mediate the relationship of the three factors on behavioral intentions. The implications of these results for both researchers and practitioners are discussed.

Additional research is needed to discover other factors that mitigate or accentuate the effects of delay, other effects of delay, and under what amounts of delay these effects occur.

[edit] Keywords

Electronic Commerce; Response Time; Website Design; Attitudes; Performance