Reposted from: TAD Consortium May 2003 Information Update No. 1

TAD Consortium May 2003 Information Update No. 1

What makes a Web site credible?
Kath Straub, Ph.D., CUA, Chief Scientist of HFI, and Susan Weinschenk,
Ph.D., CUA, Chief of Advanced Studies and Projects for HFI

Overview

What are the characteristics of a Web site that make a person decide the
information at the site is credible? Recent research indicates that not all
people make the decision of credibility using the same criteria.

Domain experts (e.g., Doctors on a health site or Certified Financial
Planners on a financial information site) focus on brand, company
reputation, information sources, and internal fact-checking to evaluate the
credibility of an information site. In contrast, consumers use
characteristics such as look-and-feel and information design to evaluate
credibility.

Recent research

Consumer watchdog/research groups have reported large scale surveys in which
they asked internet users to report the criteria that they use to evaluate
the credibility of Web sites [3,4]. Advocacy groups such as Consumer Web
Watch (the Web watchdog arm of Consumers Union) and the Pew Internet and
American Life Projects each report large scale surveys concluding that
consumers report that they rely on the following types of information:
(1) Site owners/sponsors,
(2) Reported information sources/citations,
(3) Date of posting,
(4) Clearly distinguished content, editorial content and advertising copy.

In fact, both groups also report that, although consumers SAY that they use
these factors to evaluate a site's authority and trustworthiness, they fail
to actually do these things. Pew reports that only about one quarter of
health information seekers actually check the source and timeliness of
information every time they search for health information.

So what characteristics are they really using, not just reporting on? Fogg
and colleagues conducted two major studies [1,2] exploring the
characteristics of a Web site that influence consumers and domain experts
separately. Participants were asked to explore/ evaluate pairs of similar
Web sites, rank the sites (within a given pair) as more or less credible
than the other and then report why they selected that particular ranking.

A total of 2,864 participants completed the consumer study [1]. Participants
rated site pairs from one of 10 randomly assigned content categories:
E-commerce, Entertainment, Finance, Health, News, Non-profit,
Opinion/Review, Search Engines, Sports or Travel. Each category contained 10
sites.

A total of 15 participants completed the expert study [2]. In this study,
site categories were limited to Health and Finance. Again, participants
ranked and commented on a random site pair. Participants were assigned to
their domain expertise category.

Here is what the studies found:

Consumers who were not domain experts tended to use the same criteria even
on different types of sites. The criteria used most often are (in order of
frequency):
- Design look
- Information focus
- Information design
- Advertising
- Company motive
- Name and reputation
- Information bias
- Information accuracy
- Writing tone
- Information source

For the domain experts the most often used criteria were (in order of
frequency):
- Name
- Information source
- Company motive
- Information focus
- Advertising
- Design look
- Information bias
- Information design
- Writing tone
- Information accuracy

Although these studies were conducted in the United States, similar findings
have been found in other countries. In a study at The University of
Heidelberg [5], consumers in a focus group confidently reported that they
would look primarily to the information source to evaluate credibility of
health information Web sites. However, in practice none of the participants
explored the "About Us" sections of any of the sites that they visited.
Further, participants could remember the name of the [Web site or] company
or organization presenting task-critical information only about 20% of the
time.

It seems that consumers use parameters of Web sites that they feel confident
evaluating: Look and Information design. In short, attractive and
easy-to-use Web sites are construed as being credible.

Possible explanations:

In looking at why consumers use the factors they do there are several
possible explanations.

Social Psychologists (and marketers) have known through research for quite
some time that attractive people are responded to more positively than
unattractive people: they receive more help, more job offers, higher pay and
shorter prison sentences [6,7,8 and 9]. In the absence of other criteria for
evaluation (or even in their presence), perhaps the same holds true for Web
sites?

Or perhaps it is the famous "halo effect." A halo effect occurs when one
positive characteristic of a person broadly influences the way that that
person is viewed by others. Again, the positive characteristic is typically
attractiveness. The halo of attractiveness broadly influences the perception
of unrelated attributes:
- Attractive children are viewed as being less naughty than their less
attractive peers for the same behaviors [10],
- Good looking people are automatically assigned favorable traits such as
kindness, honesty and talent [11]. Apparently, attractive Web sites are
attributed expertise and trustworthiness -- the characteristics Fogg uses to
define credibility -- in the same way.

What is the impact?

In terms of design, we are reminded that effective design depends on knowing
the audience: Site characteristics that influence credibility for domain
experts are very different than those which influence consumers.

Look and usability are intimately correlated with Web credibility for
general consumers. In the absence of expertise, consumers appeal to look and
ease of use to evaluate a site's credibility. Not only are attractive,
easy-to-use sites rated more credible than frustrating or chaotic ones,
users explicitly acknowledge the importance of this characteristic in the
evaluation process.

Note: the references for this newsletter are posted at
http://www.humanfactors.com/downloads/mar03.asp
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