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WebQual™: A Measure of Web Site Quality Eleanor T. LoiaconoManagement DepartmentWashburn HallWorcester Polytechnic InstituteWorcester, Massachusetts
[email protected]:(508) 831-5206f: (508) 831-5720Richard T. WatsonMIS DepartmentTerry College of BusinessUniversity of GeorgiaAthens, Georgia
[email protected]:(706) 542-3706f: (706) 583-0037Dale L. GoodhueMIS DepartmentTerry College of BusinessUniversity of GeorgiaAthens, Georgia
[email protected]:(706) 542-3746f: (706) 583-0037 WebQual™: A Measure of Web Site Quality Eleanor T. Loiacono is an assistant professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Sheholds a doctorate from the University of Georgia and a Masters of BusinessAdministrations from Boston College. Her research specialization is in electroniccommerce, Web site quality, electronic advertising, and IS change management. She wasrunner up in the 1999 George Day Doctoral Research Award given by the Journal of Market-Focused Management’s Coca-Cola Center for Marketing Studies. She has published in The Journal of Data Warehousing and The Journal of InformationTechnology Management . Richard Watson is the J. Rex Fuqua Distinguished Chair for Internet Strategy andDirector of the Center for Information Systems Leadership in the Terry College of Business, the University of Georgia. He has published in leading journals in several fieldsas well as authored books on data management and electronic commerce and giveninvited seminars in nearly 20 countries. He VP of Communications of AIS and recentlycompleted a term as a senior editor of MIS Quarterly . He is a visiting professor at Agder University College, Norway. Dale L. Goodhue is an associate professor of MIS at the Terry College of Business at theUniversity of Georgia. He received his Ph.D. in MIS from MIT, and has published in Management Science , MIS Quarterly , Decision Sciences , Sloan Management Review andother journals. He is an Associate Editor for Management Science and the MIS Quarterly .His research interests include measuring the impact of information systems, the impact of task-technology fit on individual performance, and the management of data and other ISinfrastructures/resources. Current projects include understanding the impact of DataWarehousing and ERP systems. WebQual™ 1 : A Measure of Web Site Quality ABSTRACT A critical concern of both Information System (IS) and Marketing researchers has been how to measure the quality of a Web site. This research uses the general theoreticalframes of the Theory of Reasoned Action and the Technology Acceptance Model asstarting points to develop a measure of Web site quality that predicts consumer reuse of the site. The paper presents the development and validation process of a Web site qualitymeasure with 12 core dimensions: informational fit-to-task; tailored communications;trust; response time; ease of understanding; intuitive operations; visual appeal;innovativeness; emotional appeal; consistent image; on-line completeness; and relativeadvantage. Instrument development was based on an extensive literature review, as wellas interviews with Web designers and visitors. The instrument was refined using twosuccessive samples (of 510 and 336 Web users), and the measurement validity of thefinal instrument was tested with a third confirmatory sample of 311 Web users.Implications and recommended courses of action are given for Web site managers as wellas future research questions for IS researchers. Keywords: Web site quality, instrument development, Theory of Reasoned Action(TRA), & Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) ISRL Categories: HA08, HC0101, HB19, HD0108 1 WebQual™’s trademark status is noted on the cover, abstract, and introduction page. The “™” has beenomitted from the text of the paper. WebQual™: A Measure of Web Site Quality INTRODUCTION Web sites are a critical component of the rapidly growing phenomenon of e-Commerce. Worldwide, Internet retail sales have grown from $18.23 billion in thefourth-quarter of 2000 to $25.29 billion in the fourth-quarter of 2001 (Pastore 2002).Web sites play a significant role in the overall marketing communication mix (Berthon etal. 1996)—they complement direct selling activities, present supplemental material toconsumers, project a corporate image, and provide basic company information tocustomers. Businesses are eager to develop means for measuring and analyzing consumer responses to different kinds of Web site designs. Of particular concern to businesses isthe question of whether, based on a consumer's reaction to a Web site, that person islikely to revisit or make a purchase from the site in the future.Given the importance to both practitioners and researchers, it is critical that aninstrument specifically designed to measure the consumer’s perception of Web sitequality is developed following a rigorous and comprehensive method. Existing efforts todate have inappropriately narrowed their scope, have used weak measurement validitytests, or too small sample sizes. Though valuable, none of these measures has beendeveloped with the rigor required for a potentially widely used measure of a criticalconstruct in research and practice.This article seeks to address that gap within the realm of business-to-consumer Web sites, by reporting on the development of an instrument, WebQual, to measure Website quality. We use a strong theoretical base, a careful instrument developmentmethodology, and rigorous measurement validity testing. As a general underlying theoretical model we use the Theory of Reasoned Action(TRA) (Ajzen and Fishbein 1980; Fishbein and Ajzen 1975), and particularly TRA asapplied to information technology, in the form of the Technology Acceptance Model(TAM) (Davis 1989). These theories provide a strong conceptual basis for a link betweenuser beliefs about a Web site and the behavior of reusing the Web site at a later time.However, TRA does not specify which beliefs might be pertinent for technologyuse behaviors, and TAM only identifies two very general beliefs: ease of use andusefulness. Our effort to develop a measure of Web site quality starts by looking both beyond ease of use and usefulness, and within ease of use and usefulness. We do notnarrow the focus to only ease of use and usefulness for two reasons. First, there isevidence that the use of the Web is driven by some additional factors beyond these two.In particular, use of the Web may have some entertainment value that is not easilycaptured by ease of use or usefulness (Hoffman and Novak 1996; Singh and Nikunj1999). For this reason it is important to consider the possibility of adding to Davis' twogeneral constructs.Secondly, following Goodhue and Thompson (1995), we believe that to be mostuseful to businesses, an instrument measuring Web site quality must identify in moredetail the specific aspects that cause a Web site to be easy to use or useful to consumers.This greater clarity of detail is important conceptually since we may discover empiricallythat some aspects are more important than others in determining consumer behavior. It isimportant from a practical business sense because without having a finer grained measurethan "ease of use" or "usefulness," business might not know what changes to make in aWeb site that was, for example, rated low in "usefulness."
