Last modified: 03/10/2005

Journal of the Association for Information Systems
Special Theme on HCI in MIS

January and March 2004

Background

Papers in the Special Theme

Web Site Delays: How Tolerant are Users?

Dennis F. Galletta, University of Pittsburgh
Raymond Henry, Clemson University
Scott McCoy, College of William & Mary
Peter Polak, University of Miami

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 provide cautions on delays of 12 seconds or more. One of the strongest conclusions had been that complex tasks seem to allow longer response times. This study examined, in an experimental setting, delay times of 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, and 12 seconds using 196 undergraduate students. It was hypothesized that longer and longer delays would cause diminishing negative effects on satisfaction, intentions to return to the site, and performance (number of tasks completed), that familiarity (mostly related to the site's terminology) would moderate those relationships, and that satisfaction is positively related to intentions to return. Subjects were randomly assigned a single delay time and were asked to complete 9 search tasks, exploring a familiar and an unfamiliar site. All of the hypotheses were supported. Plots of the dependent variables performance, attitudes, and behavioral intentions, along those delays, indeed 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 performance and behavioral intentions begin to flatten when the delays extend to 4 seconds or longer, and attitudes flatten when the delays extend to 8 seconds or longer. Future research should include other factors such as expectations, variability, and feedback, and other outcomes such as actual purchasing behavior, to more fully understand the effects of delays in today's Web environment.

Knowledge-based Support in a Group Decision Making Context: An Expert-Novice Comparison

Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
Izak Benbasat, University of British Columbia

This research examines the use of knowledge-based and explanation facilities to support group decision making of experts versus novices. Consistent with predictions from the persuasion literature, our results show that experts exhibit a higher level of criticality and involvement in their area of expertise; this not only decreases their likelihood of being persuaded by a knowledge-based system, but also accounts for a lower group consensus among experts as compared to novices. Novices are more easily persuaded by the system and find the system to be more useful than experts do. This research integrates theories from the persuasion literature to understand expert-novice differences in group decision making in a knowledge-based support environment. The findings suggest that the analyses and explanations provided by knowledge-based systems better support the decision making of novices than experts. Future research is needed to integrate other types of information provision support (e.g., cognitive feedback) into knowledge-based systems to increase their effectiveness as a group decision support tool for domain experts.