When the Wait isn’t So Bad: A Research Program on Web Delay
Speaker
Dennis Galletta
Professor of Business Administration, The Katz Graduate School of Business, University of Pittsburgh
When
-
Where
Newell-Simon Hall 1305 (Michael Mauldin Auditorium)
Video
Video link
Description
Web usability is plagued with a peculiar drawback: highly-variable, intermittent, and frequent interpage delay while becoming lost on sites that have poor or nonexistent search facilities. For several years, the HCI literature studied user reactions to long computer response time in clerical applications, but few studies have examined this problem in the domain of the web. Examining the problems of delay and scent in a web context is important, because the web touches hundreds of millions of users worldwide, most of whom have little formal computer or task training. Hence, we have examined in our labs consequences of delay on performance, attitudes, and stress, along with factors that interact with delay. Some of our experiments have been published and some are still under review. Six studies allowed us to examine: (1) What is an “acceptable” perceived delay? (2) Does this perception holds across two cultures? (3) What is the nature of a 3-way interaction among delay, scent, and site depth on performance and perceptions? (4) What is the nature of a 3-way interaction among delay, variability, and feedback on performance and perceptions? (5) What are the effects of delay and scent on performance and stress (measured both “objectively” by measuring galvanic skin response – GSR – as well as perceptually by questionnaire)? (6) What are the effects of time constraint and scent on real sites on performance, stress, and attitudes? Conclusions from the six studies are that user impatience is high, especially in the US as compared with Mexico, and the effects of delay and poor information scent explain significant variance in a number of outcomes, especially when considering other interacting antecedents. We have observed many outcomes of this impatience, even including measures of physiological stress. Future research can be extended to the field, focus on motivations for using the site, and take into account other factors in the natural environment of users.
Speaker's Bio
Dennis Galletta is Past President of the Association for Information Systems (AIS), is an AIS Fellow, and is Professor of Business Administration at the Katz Graduate School of Business, University of Pittsburgh, where he has been since 1985. He obtained his doctorate in 1985 at the University of Minnesota (major advisor: Gordon B. Davis) with a major in management information systems and a minor in psychology. He teaches Human-Computer Interaction to PhD students and Information Systems to MBA students and executives. His specific research interests lie in the areas of end-user attitudes, behavior, and performance. He has published articles in journals such as Management Science, Information Systems Research, Journal of MIS, Journal of AIS, Communications of the ACM, European Journal of Information Systems, Decision Sciences, Communications of the AIS, Accounting Management and Information Technologies, and Data Base. He has been on several editorial boards, including Information Systems Research, MIS Quarterly, and Data Base. He and Ping Zhang have just become Co-Editors in Chief of a new, upcoming journal AIS Transactions on HCI, the first Transactions journal for AIS. They also recently edited two books on HCI in MIS, part of the Zwass Advances in MIS series. They were fortunate to have gotten 37 fine manuscripts from 72 authors, most who require no introduction. He was program co-chair for ICIS 2005 and AMCIS 2003, conference chair for the Inaugural AMCIS 1995, and will be conference co-chair for ICIS 2011 in Shanghai. He was ICIS Treasurer from 1994–1998, VP of Member Services for AIS from 2001–2003, was a member of AIS Council representing the Americas in 1996 and 1997, and taught information systems courses on the Fall 1999 voyage of Semester at Sea.
Speaker's Website
http://www.pitt.edu/~galletta/
Host
Brad Myers