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Development of an instrument for evaluating customer interface of B-to-C websites

University of British Columbia

This report describes the development of a web feature checklist that evaluates customer interfaces in the context of B-to-C (Business-to-Consumer) business. The associated study concentrated on the interaction between consumers and businesses, and the experimental design adopted as its framework the "7Cs" concept, which represents seven design elements to the customer interface introduced by Rayport, Jaworski, Griffin, and Dosiso in chapter four of "E-Commerce"(2000). The research was conducted in two phases. In phase one, a 113-item questionnaire pool was created by compiling issues proposed by the original 7Cs concept, in combination with items derived from existing guidelines, checklists and research works. Twelve respondents were then asked to categorize each item from the questionnaire pool into one of the "C" categories, using the card-sorting methodology discussed by Moore and Benbasat (1991). This process of sorting resulted in a 56-item checklist. In phase two, the checklist was applied to evaluate three websites selected and ranked by www.forbes.com. A non-parametric analysis showed that the ranking among the three websites by twelve respondents using the checklist were consistent with the ranking by Forbes. The test results proved that the checklist developed in this research can be an effective instrument for evaluating customer interface in B-to-C businesses. Limitations of the study and possible directions for future research are also addressed in this report.

Thesis/Dissertation

application/pdf

2009-10-17

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/13962

Business Administration

University of British Columbia

UBCV

DSpace