The Effect of Brand on the Evaluation of Websites

Abstract

Abstr act. The effect of brand on consumer attitudes towards real and virtual goods is largely documented in consumer psychology and marketing. There is an obvious link between the design of a website and its brand. Yet, this effect has attracted little attention from the HCI community. This paper presents empirical evidence showing that brand attitude influences the evaluation of websites. The effect was reliable across different measures: people holding better attitudes were more positive in the evaluation of aesthetics, pleasure and usability. A sample of students (N=145) with a background in HCI was tested, suggesting that brand may influence the output of expert evaluators. The study provides support to the proposition of UX as a contextual-dependent response to the interaction with computing systems and has important implications for the design and evaluation of websites which are discussed in the conclusion. Intr oductionThere is a pervasive move in HCI research and practice to consider hedonic aspects of user experiences alongside pragmatic qualities in the evaluation and design of interactive systems [1][2][3]. Responses such as emotions, aesthetic judgments and fun are among the most prominent aspects of experience investigated [4][5][6]. The User Experience (UX) is a complex response to the interaction with computing systems [1]. This response is a consequence of individual predispositions of the user (e.g., attitudes, motivations and needs), characteristics of the interactive system (e.g., purpose, functionality and usability) and contextual dependencies (e.g., task and environment). Thus, UX is elicited by an array of variables which combine to determine overall quality judgments [7].The effect of brand on consumer attitudes towards real and virtual goods is well documented in consumer psychology and marketing. There are some evident links between a website design and its brand, yet, with the exception of studies of trust [8] and the emerging field of captology [9], brand has attracted little attention from the HCI community. In marketing research, the website is considered a powerful medium in forming and sustaining a positive attitude towards a brand and its products [10]. Empirical research has demonstrated that attitude toward a web site is a good predictor of consumer brand choice [11]. In this paper, we deal with the opposite research question, namely Is attitude towards brand a good predictor of the userexperience with a website? Another unique theme of UX is its emphasis on the subjective nature of experience. Traditional usability research emphasized the objectivity of evaluation methods and measures by favouring, for example, user observation over user opinion. Performance variables, such as error rate and time to complete a task, were deemed to be relatively stable among a sample of users with comparable level of computing knowledge, motor and cognitive skills. On the contrary, UX explicitly recognises variations across judgments and focuses on understanding the factors which modulate peo...

The Effect of Religious Identity on User Judgment of Website Quality

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