Assessing User Trust to Improve Web Usability

Abstract

The technological advancement has significantly influenced the style of human-computer interaction, especially for World Wide Web. The users can now afford to choose amongst multiple websites offering similar services. The website which provides a usable interface along with requisite services, scores over its competitors. User interaction with a website is driven by two major factors- the performance factors associated with the site and the emotional factors associated with human being. Amongst the emotional factors, trust is a dominant driving factor of web usage. The more a user trusts a website, more shall be the usage and vice-versa. Trust has almost always been specified qualitatively. This study presents a distinct method of measuring user trust on a website, by considering the features of that website. Four distinct states of a feature are considered in the study. Each of these states has a different impact on user trust formation. The method proposed considers the features, their states and their contribution towards trust formation to compute the user trust on a website. Such a measure can be effectively employed to determine the trust level of a website as perceived by its users. Comparison of different websites with respect to their trust levels can therefore, provide the designer an insight into the weak features of that site. Identifying and correcting these, can help in retaining the users and hence increase the usability of that site.