Newswise — What makes users flood one Web site while another rarely gets a hit?
In a word, trust. Creighton University business professors, Cynthia Corritore and Beverly Kracher, along with Susan Wiedenbeck, a Professor of Information Science and Technology at Drexel University, are working to find out why users will trust one Web site and shun another.
In the online world, trust is defined as an attitude of confident expectation that a person's vulnerabilities will not be exploited, Kracher said.
Trust becomes relevant when an online interaction involves risk or vulnerability, Corritore and Kracher said. Their work has shown that the higher the risk, the lower the trust and the lower the risk, the higher the trust.
The degree of trust also depends on what the user plans to do with the information gathered from the site. For example, information involving low cost items is likely to be considered less risky than information about potential cancer treatment.
So far, the research has focused only on informational Web sites but will soon transfer to studying commercial sites. In expanding their research, Corritore and Kracher hope to make commercial Web sites more effective for sharing information and selling products and services.
Corritore and Kracher have developed a model that can be used to study an individual's trust in various online situations. The model, like their research, relates only to transactional and informational uses of the Web, not one-on-one communications " like e-mail or chat rooms. Credibility, usability and risk all have an impact on decisions in the online environment, they said.
A site's usability affects both risk and credibility. According to Corritore and Kracher, an easy-to-use Web site is likely to decrease a user's perceived risk. Likewise, if a site conveys honesty, a positive reputation, expertise and predictability " all characteristics that contribute to credibility " a user's feelings of risk will be reduced.
Between these two components, credibility appears to be the greater factor in developing online trust, according to Corritore
"That was a surprise," she said. "Most people define trust in terms of risk." Designing a Web site that allows users to easily find what they are looking for is a good first step in developing trust in the online world. Because this is a factor solely controlled by the site creator, it is an important element to consider.
"From a business point of view, you can have a very large impact on the trust factor from your design," Corritore said.
Beyond usability, characteristics such as color, type style and the amount of information also influence a user's online trust, according to Corritore. Likely the most important factor is complexity.
It does not take much to make a Web page overly demanding for the user, she said. Relatively simple elements " like centered text that creates irregular left margins " may use too much of a person's mental capacity to leave anything for figuring out how to actually use the Web page.
But usability should not be the sole factor in determining a user's trust in a Web site, said Kracher. There is always the risk that an unscrupulous operator could use the model to build trust for potentially fraudulent purposes.
Still, using the model can give established companies an advantage in building trust.
"A company's reputation does make a difference and leads to online trust," Kracher said.
To help bolster online trust, an individual can recruit the support of friends. Research has shown that if a user gets a recommendation from a respected friend about a Web site, he or she will tend to trust the site, she said.
Other variables of trust, which will be researched by Corritore and Kracher, are age and gender. In the off-line world, existing research indicates there is no gender difference in trust between males and females, and familiarity with technology is more likely than age to influence trust.
In additional future research, the two professors plan to apply the model to various online business strategies in marketing, management and other areas of commerce.
According to Corritore, one thing appears certain, online trust can be as difficult to regain once it is lost.
Creighton is an independent, comprehensive university operated by the Jesuits. Creighton has been ranked at or near the top of Midwestern universities in the U.S. News & World Report magazine's "America's Best Colleges" edition for more than a decade.
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