Abstract
Organizational websites have become a vital element in informing its stakeholders and inducing transaction decisions, especially for institutions dealing with a large and dispersed user group. Achieving the desired user-centricity to satisfy users’ needs is ever more difficult when the organizational website offerings are large and diverse. In such cases, website design is done frequently in decentralized fashion, with a common, centrally defined, web structure and responsibilities for content distributed to individual organizational units. We challenge the effectiveness of this method, based on the empirical website analysis for a large state university. Using a scenario based approach, we analyzed the website’s structure (static effectiveness) as well as navigational properties (dynamic effectiveness). Findings show that when the website content and navigation are created by a number of designers using a site-of-sites distributed approach, significant differences may be observed especially in dynamic effectiveness, leading to overall different user perceptions of effectiveness. Furthermore, differences in design between units will lead to an overall inconsistent user experience. Meanwhile, the results from static effectiveness do not reveal any significance. This observable difference indirectly reinforces the importance of dynamic effectiveness.
Recommended Citation
Shum, Anna; Liu, Lili; and Wagner, Christian, "Measuring the Effectiveness of an Organizational Website to Stakeholders " (2013). SAIS 2013Proceedings. 35.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/sais2013/35