Web Site Personality Study

1
Web Site Personality Study

• Origin Outgrowth of NSF Research Project The
  Role of Customer Relationships in Electronic
  Commerce
• Several project partners are designing
  personality into their web sites
• Personality a known factor in interpersonal
  relationships
• Personality a large topic
• Human Big 5, Meyers-Briggs, etc.
• Brand
• Objective
• Determine an essential set of personality
  attributes (maximum one page) that can be
  incorporated as a portion of a larger instrument
  being developed for evaluation/diagnosis of
  individual web sites

2
Web Site Personality Study Protocol

• 70 web sites
• Quite varied in type and purpose
• Selected from student suggestions plus business
  yellow pages
• 130 personality items
• 3 observations/site by each student
• n212 observations
• 70 students, graduate MIS class and undergraduate
  electronic commerce class for MIS majors

3
Item Analysis

• Repeatability of duplicated items
• Same distribution of responses at beginning and
  end of questionnaire
• 8 and 7 N/A for Competence
• 50 items eliminated - 10 evaluation as N/A
• Evil
• Hedonic
• Pensive
• Tender-minded
• Promiscuous
• Sentimental
• Angry
• Gregarious

4
Item Clusters

• Information Quality (32 of variance)
• Physical appearance
• Cognitive (attractive)
• Affective (engaging)
• Informative
• Helpful, resourceful, knowledgeable, competent
• Logic, organized
• Accessibility, up-to-date
• Flexibility
• Interest
• Information presentation, format (14 of
  variance)
• Information quantity, complexity, load (7 of
  variance)
• Items associated with information account for 53
  of variance - thats what web sites are for!

5
Personality - Brand and Human

• Brand Big 5
• Sincerity
• Excitement
• Competence
• Sophistication
• Ruggedness

• Human Big 5
• Extraversion
• Openness
• Negative emotionality
• Agreeableness
• Conscientiousness
• Human additional
• Sexuality
• Attractiveness
• Negative valence

6
Frequency Distributions

• Overall Web Site Rating
• 90 rate a 3 or worse out of 5
• How often use web in last month
• 54 more than once per day
• 32 once every other day
• 60 of people have purchased via the web
• 11 of purchased once
• 14 twice
• 15 3 times
• 66 have experience designing a web site