Factors Affecting Customer-Centric Website Design - Essay Example

?Factors Affecting Centric Website Design H.I.Alrabiah School of Computing & Mathematical Sciences Liverpool John Moores Liverpool L3 3AF H.I.Alrabiah@2011.ljmu.ac.uk Abstract. It has been argued that designing a customer-centric website is so important, yet is so difficult to accomplish. Several factors could be forwarded as the cause of this challenge. This paper identifies three such factors that make web designing a particularly fluid industry: the effect of culture and gender, the growth of mobile web through tablets and smartphones and the impact of the growing influence of Web 2.0 consumers who not only consume but also produce. The paper concludes that website designers must exploit Cloud technologies and use teams that are multicultural and gender sensitive when designing their websites if they truly want to make their customers the centre of their work. Introduction The infrastructure known as the Internet has been at the heart of globalisation, flattening the world, and causing disruptive change in business bringing about new models and new products and services. At its core the web browser has been the most visible interface for consumers and businesses to enjoy these changes brought about by the Internet. With increasing use and time spent on the internet, and with the accompanying information overload, businesses are seeking to capture differentiate themselves through website designs that attract and engage customers. It is within this context that web designers are being tasked to come up with customer-centred websites. Customer-centric web design aims at creating a website that is intended to meet the specific needs of customers as opposed to all web visitors. When considering customer-centred design, Schneider (2011) recommends focusing on the customer buying process. Garrett (2003) suggested that there are six key areas that the web designer will need to focus on to enhance the users’ experience: visual design, information architecture, information design, navigation design, interaction design, and content. Given the highly fluid nature of the internet and its associated technologies, web designers are finding it difficult to design the much desired customer-centric websites. In the next section, the paper begins by trying to understand why customer-centric web design is so important for any individual or organisation that is putting up or has a website. After that the paper discusses three factors that make achieving customer-centric web design difficult. First it discusses the effect of culture and gender, then the impact of the emergence of the mobile web and finally the rise of prosumerism. The paper then concludes with suggestions on possible techniques that web designers could use to tackle the challenge posed by these three factors. Literature Review Importance of Customer-Centric Web Designs Naturally, one would ask why is achieving customer-centric web designs so important to warrant its discussion? Porter (2001) argued that the internet weakened industry profitability by influencing the five forces that underlie industry structure. The Internet reduced switching costs and shifted bargaining power to end consumers. The web essentially changed the dynamics of the relationship between organisations and their customers. The customer is now more empowered and more in control of the relationship than ever before (Perfetti, 2006). The web has not only made it easier for customers to find alternatives but it has also lowered the costs they incur either in searching for alternatives or moving to them. Customers only care about that which is important to them. This means that if they cannot find the products, services or information that brought them to a particular website, they will simply go elsewhere. To prevent customers from going elsewhere makes it necessary for organizations to design their websites with the customer as the core focus. Also, it has been found that there is a big distinction between the numbers of people who visit a website and those who took the particular action that the organisation intended (Google, 2008). For example, if the goal of setting up the website was to encourage people to subscribe for a newsletter, if 1,000 people visited the website and only 10 subscribed then the website is said to have a low conversion rate of 1%. Customer-centric websites have been found to have higher conversion rates (Chaffey, 2009), implying that they achieve their goals more than a website that is not customer-centred. A good example of a customer-centric website is Amazon.com. As a commercial website, the main goal of the website is to create sales. One of the key measures for commercial websites is revenue per user. According to Chaffey (2012), in 2011 Amazon’s revenue per user was $189 in comparison to eBay’s $39, Google’s $24 and Facebook’s $4. Amazon.com has been able to achieve this because of its feature-rich websites that include: personalised web pages with recommendations and notifications, 1-Click online purchasing technology, customer reviews, ability to view selected interior pages of books, secure payment systems and so on (Chaffey, 2012). Amazon’s websites are developed iteratively to keep up and often surpass consumer expectations. Factors that make Customer-Centric Web Design Difficult There are several factors that could be attributed as causes of the difficulty faced by web designers in coming up with truly customer- centric designs. For starters, one could argue at length just over what being customer-centred design is and whether it is an achievable objective. We could for instance say that a customer-centric design is that which fully enhances the total user experience when he/she visits the website. However, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs cautions us that once a person’s lower level needs are met, that person seeks a higher level until he/she reaches self-actualization (Mullins, 2010). According to Corrigan (2011), user experience is analogous to Maslow’s hierarchy. Once availability and basic support needs are satisfied, users demand for greater experience that gives them more significance, such as connection, growth, or personal contribution. This implies a shift in what customers want and hence how the website matches those wants. This being the case, pursuing customer-centric design becomes a very elusive, expensive and possibly unattainable quest. Even if our argument above were true there has to be some factors that are making this pursuit of enriching the total user experience at a website elusive. In this paper, three such factors have been identified and will be discussed in the following sections. These factors are the effects of culture and gender, the emergence and growth of the mobile web and the rise of prosumerism. Effect of Culture and Gender on Web Design I. Culture Singh et al. (2003) employed content analysis of 40 American-based companies to compare their domestic and Chinese websites and found significant differences in cultural characteristics for all major categories tested. This led the authors to conclude that the web is not culturally neutral. Culture has been found to have a profound influence on how business is conducted across different communities (Hofstede et al., 2010) and given that the web is nowadays an important medium for conducting business, it is expected that culture should have an influence here as well. In fact, Barber and Badre (2001) argued that considering cultural elements in website design can have a direct impact on user performance and thus the need to merge culture and usability. Hofstede et al. (2010) defined culture as the collective programming of the mind that makes members of one group distend from members of another group, and the nation state has been used by various researchers as a loose categorization for culture. This means that the state could be used to presume the expected consumer preferences on web design, based on analysis of Hofstede (2011) cultural dimensions of individualism-collectivism, uncertainty avoidance, power distance, and femininity-masculinity. According to Cyr et al. (2005) culture has been related to a wide range of consumer preferences in non-internet settings including attitudes toward advertising, brand loyalty consumer values, consumption patterns, and consumer trust. Some of these preferences have been observed in internet settings as well as with website design preferences varying across cultures (Barber and Badre, 2001) and affecting trust and satisfaction (Cyr, 2008). However, these relationships have not been statistically modelled (Cyr, 2008). An effective customer-centric website design should ideally be that which attracts, and engages its target online consumers. Such a site will have a certain stickiness in terms of its qualities that should make visitors remain at that website rather than move to another website. Examples of design elements often considered in website design include ease of access, information architecture, use of symbols and graphics, colour preferences, familiarity of metaphors, transparency of terminology / language and site features such as links, maps, search functions, and page layout (Cyr and Trevor-Smith, 2004). Given that different cultures interpret many of these design elements differently, it is natural that customers will therefore interpret the customer-centricity of a website based on their culture (Cyr and Trevor-Smith, 2004). For example, Japan is a highly homogenised state which implies a deeper and more traditional cultural perspective. On the other hand, the United States is a heterogeneous, and multicultural state thus it may be more accommodating to different cultures than Japan. This means that whereas, say, Japanese customers may have strong preferences with regards to colours, graphics or symbols used in a webpage, US customers may be more accommodative (Hofstede, 2011). According to Cyr (2008) online shopping is global and represents a multicultural community where internet users whose primary language is English are (35.6%), followed by Chinese (12.2%), Japanese (9.5%), Spanish (8%), and German (7%). Considering that websites can be accessed from virtually any part of the globe, the work of designing becomes that much harder in order to accommodate this diverse global community. There are different techniques that organisations use in trying to solve this challenge such as developing multiple website versions that use IP address to deploy the most suitable version at a given location and allowing/blocking website access from certain locations. II. Gender Given that men and women have been shown to differ in their attitudes toward both the internet and physical shopping environments, it would not be absurd to predict them to have similar attitudes towards the different features of a website such as layout, readability, graphics, ease-of-use and appeal. The traditional computing environment as a whole was seen as being masculine, but with women increasingly foraying into sciences at school and more women becoming economically empowered, gender will increasingly be a critical factor to consider in the designing of an online shopping experience. In the research conducted to examine gender differences in preferences for website design, men were reported to have a more satisfying online shopping experience than women (Cyr and Bonanni 2005; Simon 2001). In their research, Cyr and Bonanni (2005); Simon (2001), found that there were significant differences between the responses of males and females with regards to the visual appeal of a website and in the site’s ability to fulfil their personal needs and expectations. Cyr and Bonanni (2005) investigated 11 website design elements under three broad categories: information design, navigation design and visual design. The authors found that significant differences in perceptions exist between men and women in five of these 11 eleven design elements, namely: presentation of product information, general organisation of information, ease of navigation, degree of interaction and meaningfulness of website animations. From their findings Cyr and Bonanni (2005); Simon (2001) demonstrated that males found website designs more satisfying than females. However, with the increased numbers of women shopping online, designing websites that women find satisfying has commercial value. This means that website designers will have to place greater attention to design that is considered favourable to both genders or else risk losing out on this large customer segment. Emergence of Mobile Web Today’s consumers have become increasingly reliant on the web for their everyday life. This trend is being supported by the increased affordability and variety of mobile devices that offer web access on the go. This phenomenon led Jones and Marsden (2006) to predict mobile web access as the next big thing for both mobile devices specifically and web services in general. To distinguish this phenomenon from traditional way that consumers used to access the web, researchers have coined the terms “Mobile Web” and “Stationary Web”. Mobile Web refers to using the web on mobile devices, while “Stationary Web” refers to using desktop or laptop computers to use the web (Cui and Roto, 2008). According to comScore (2007) – a leader in measuring the digital world – by June 2007, in Japan, mobile phone web users were 53.6 million people in comparison to 53.7 million stationary web users. This means that the mobile web nearly equalled PC based internet users. In the US, six in ten adults (about 63%) go online using the mobile web devices (Brenner, 2012). Further data from Brenner (2012) shows the distribution of these mobile devices among American adults as: cell phone - 87% , laptop - 57%, e-book reader - 19%, and 19% have a tablet computer such as iPad, Kindle Fire and Samsung Galaxy tab. This data essentially means that the mobile web consumer segment is too large for any serious provider of web services to ignore. The challenge brought about by the mobile web is that these devices demand a different viewing experience from the conventional desktop and laptop. For starters, their user interfaces and screens are smaller, which implies use of micro-browsers. This means that for an optimal viewing experience, websites will have to limit site graphics and keep texts brief (Shelly and Campbell, 2012). Secondly, consumers still demand for real time information processing and interactivity to enhance their personal as well as online and community experiences even though many of these mobile devices are unable to provide the necessary resources (Kovachev et al. ,2010). This means that web designers will have to develop sites and applications that incorporate Cloud computing technologies so as to allow these small devices to give their users the enriched experience that they desire. Another major source of challenge for developing a customer-centric web design brought about by the use of mobile devices is that the industry is still young. This means that most of the industry’s technologies are still proprietary for example Apple iOS, Windows Phone, and Android. This complicates the lives of web designers who now have to develop multiple versions that shall seamlessly integrate with the different user devices. For example, a consumer who owns a Dell laptop, Apple iPad and Blackberry phone expects to have a similar experience when he/she visits Amazon.com. In fact, some authors have gone to the extent of predicting doom for the entire web given the huge and increasing influence of the mobile web as consumers, developers and businesses rush to be part of this new market (Anderson and Wolff, 2010). According to Anderson and Wolff (2010) the web (here referring to web browsers and websites) is rapidly being replaced by the “app” (here referring to applications developed predominantly for tablets and smartphones) as the preferred consumer channel for accessing the internet. They argue that the web is losing out to the “app” because it has simply failed to capture what consumers really want. Rise of Prosumerism The present day website design draws much of its influence from the paradigm known as Web 2.0, where Web 2.0 refers to web development and web design supporting interactive information sharing and collaboration on the World Wide Web (Pauwels and Hellriegel, 2009). With Web 2.0 came new technology trends and business models that were characterized by a shift from “high-touch, high-margin, high-commitment” provisioning of service to “low-touch, low-margin, low-commitment” self-service (Armbrust et al., 2009). These self-service models led to an emergence of a new category of consumers that is rapidly increasing in size and influence referred to as “Prosumers”. A prosumer is someone who blurs the distinction between a producer and a consumer especially through the adoption of Web 2.0 technologies such as social networking, video on demand, blogging, mobile communications, virtual realities and so on. The prosumer is an enthusiastic and early adopter of the connected lifestyle – a lifestyle that makes little distinction between one’s home and work lives (Gerhardt, 2008).- This new breed of consumers are not content with merely consuming one’s products, they want to become the voices of those products and significantly impacting their success or failure (Gunelius, 2010). This means that customer-centricity of website design will need to incorporate tools for customers to share about their experiences, and the freedom to critique / recommend or not recommend a product. According to Pauwels and Hellriegel (2009), prosumerism has resulted in an on-going negotiation of power and control between the controllers – owners, designers, editors – and prosumers. How much the website cedes to its prosumers may determine its success or failure. For example, the website Amazon.com increased its credibility and profile among consumers when it gave its customers the tools and platform to make online recommendations and product reviews (Chaffey, 2012). The question therefore for website designers lies in predicting its target customers’ level of prosumerism in order to avail the appropriate platform within their website. Conclusions The world may have become flat with the help of the internet but even globalisation has not had the power of eliminating the power and /or the role of culture among the different communities across the globe. Culture affects how people interpret symbols, images, colour and even language. These are some of the fundamental elements used in website design, thus so long as different cultures interpret them differently customers’ experiences on a given website will not be the same. Moreover, the predominance of male actors in the web design environment, from programmers to designers to site owners, has also continued to reduce web customer-focus from the female gender. Two possible solutions to this problem are: increasing the participation of women in website design to add the feminine touch and using multicultural teams, especially when designing websites that shall be relevant across diverse regions (for multinational companies that offer products and services in many regions of the world). The mobile web and “apps” may be the rave for the moment but web designers can take solace in the fact that only the web still offers tools to develop responsive designs that can work across multiple platforms. Also, with Cloud computing, web designers can concentrate on enhancing user experience and relying on resources from the “cloud” to ensure that tablet, and smartphone users are not prevented from enjoying the experience due to device-resource limitations. 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