Web page loading speed continues to vex users, even as broadband adoption continues to increase. Several studies have addressed delays both in the context of web sites as well as interactive corporate systems, and a wide range of “rules of thumb ” have been recommended. Some studies conclude that response times should be allowed to grow to no greater than 2 seconds while other studies caution on delays of 12 seconds or more. One of the strongest conclusions had been that complex tasks seemed to allow longer response times. This study examined delay times of 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, and 12 seconds using 196 undergraduate students in an experiment. The subjects were randomly assigned a constant delay time and were asked to complete 9 search tasks, exploring a familiar and an unfamiliar site. Plots of the dependent variables performance, attitudes, and behavioral intentions, along those delays, suggested the use of non-linear regression, and the explained variance was in the neighborhood of 2%, 5%, and 7%, respectively. Focusing only on the familiar site, explained variance in attitudes and behavioral intentions grew to about 16%. A sensitivity analysis implies that decreases in

Since technology adopters are sensitive to perceived ease of use, online shoppers who are novices to a product category may be particularly sensitive. We developed a predictive model of decision quality centered on perceived ease of use for online shoppers who are novices to a product category. The antecedents of perceived ease of use in this study are novice category knowledge, perceived time pressure and purchase involvement. We had undergraduate students interact with multiple-stage shopping engines (MSSEs) of varying effort-accuracy tradeoffs in our purposebuilt Web store. Both novice category knowledge and perceived time pressure negatively impacted purchase involvement and perceived ease of use of the MSSEs. Perceived ease of use of the MSSEs positively impacted their perceived usefulness. Perceived usefulness positively impacted decision quality, which was measured objectively, with data envelopment analysis, and subjectively, with the weighted additive method. Six of the seven hypotheses were supported. Surprisingly, there were no significant differences among the MSSEs and purchase involvement did not positively impact perceived ease of use. The results, analyzed via partial

As the importance of services in our society increases, so does the importance of systematic approaches to develop these services – commonly termed New Service Development (NSD). An increasing proportion of services are now electronic services delivered over the Internet. The purpose of this article is to derive a set of key attributes that distinguish electronic from nonelectronic services and their potential influence on NSD. These key attributes are then used as a framework for analyzing NSD literature with regards to their applicability for the development of electronic services. This analysis reveals several gaps in NSD research. In particular, current NSD methods are not well equipped to address the rapidly changing nature and specific cost structure found in electronic services. Current NSD methods are also not well suited to fully exploit the various advantages that electronic services offer over non-electronic counterparts, in particular, the transparent feedback generated by service usage and potentials for continuous improvement and rapid deployment of service changes.

A model of web annoyance coping was constructed based on the Cognitive-Motivational-Relational Theory of Emotion. The proposed model predicts that web users would cope with annoyances through both problem- and emotion-focused strategies. In two focus groups, participants identified nuisances encountered during use of the two websites (Facebook and MySlice), and their reactions to the nuisances as coping strategies. The findings include a web nuisance categorization and empirical evidence to support the proposed model of web annoyance coping. Besides filling a gap in the literature and providing theoretical contributions, the study has practical implications to website designers, marketers and other stakeholders.