Amateur Hour Credibility Testing for Small Business Web Sites

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Applied ResearchHeidi L. Everettincluding a Web visitor’s motivation for visiting a Website and the visitor’s prior experience with the Web(Fogg, 2002).Both Fogg and Metzger have called for research tofurther understand how user motivation specificallyimpacts credibility judgments. For example, if a Webvisitor is looking for answers to a medical question (for“a loved one who is in dire need”), the Web visitor willhave a high level of motivation and spend a considerablemore amount of time with a Web site before makinga judgment that it is time to move on to another site(Fogg, p. 12, 2003). In contrast, a person searching fora local gift shop or for a local nonprofit organizationto donate money to typically will not have a high levelof motivation to engage with a Web site. In that sense,credibility may become increasingly important for smallbusinesses if they do not require a high level of Webvisitor motivation to visit their Web sites. The bottomline is that first impressions by Web visitors may bequick and detrimental to an organization if prominentelements do not yield an interpretation of credibility.The good news is that credibility research can beconducted by organizations with little time or money.Prominence-Interpretation Theory is ideal for smallbusinesses in particular because it doesn’t requiresophisticated software, a tremendous investment of time,or expensive research methods. Small businesses withlimited staffing and resources can implement this tool ina cost-effective, efficient manner and successfully yielduseful information for improving a Web site and Webvisitor credibility judgments. In fact, Fogg, Soohoo,Danielson, and colleagues (2003), acknowledged thatalthough their sample size of 2,684 participants wasquite large, their pilot study results (which consistedof 200 participants) yielded valuable insights into thecredibility of Web sites (p. 14); the most valuable datafrom their research came from the qualitative commentsthat people made about the Web sites they evaluated asopposed to the quantitative rankings (p. 3).Six Steps to Assessing CredibilityStore managers, business owners, volunteers or stafftasked with building and maintaining a Web site mighthave clear intentions for their selection of images andtext; however, credibility testing can help identify iftheir Web sites yield a credible brand experience forconsumers or a negative credibility judgment that harmsthe business.To that end, I have developed a simple six-stepprocess for conducting cost-effective credibility testing,which is guided by the principles of Prominence-Interpretation Theory:Step 1. Identify and recruit focus groupparticipants. Much like usability studies, it is importantto recruit current or likely consumers of a business.Interviews may be used in place of focus groups;however, focus groups provide the opportunity toconnect with many users in a timely manner (MacNealy,1999; Morgan, 1988; Stewart & Shamdasani, 1990).Step 2. Determine online experiences andexpectations of participants, particularly as they mightrelate to a specific business or organization withquestions like:• What is your experience with the Web?• What activities do you participate in on the Weband how often?• What would motivate you to visit our Web site?• What are your expectations when you visit our Website or a Web site for a business similar to ours?•Step 3. Walk focus group participants throughthe Web site and note their responses to the followingquestions:• When you view this page, which elements areprominent to you?• What is your interpretation of this element andwhy?• How important is this particular element to yourWeb site visit and why?It is important to remember that this point of theresearch is not the same as usability testing. The goalis not to see whether the participants can successfullynavigate, but to identify what they notice on the Website and how they interpret the different elements.Step 4. Document responses. Focus groupresponses can be documented with the assistance ofnote takers and can be audio or video recorded andfully transcribed. To help ensure the credibility ofthe findings, member checking (Erlandson, Harris,Volume 60, Number 2, May 2013 l Technical Communication 121
Applied ResearchCredibility Testing for Small Business Web SitesSkipper, & Allen, 1993; Lincoln & Guba, 1985) can beemployed to summarize, restate, and verify participantexpectations, interpretations, credibility judgments, andexperiences with the Web or organization.Step 5. Analyze participant comments toidentify elements of the Web site that both positivelyand negatively influence the credibility judgments thatvisitors make. Statements should be analyzed using opencoding to form categories based on similarities of thelanguage used. Statements can be compared, contrasted,and combined in main categories or subcategories andsometimes renamed until they are reduced to a pointwhere further reduction of the list is no longer possible(Glaser & Horton, 2004).Step 6. Determine key improvements that canbe made to the Web site. The improvements must focuson the most troublesome areas, must address credibilityconcerns identified by visitors, and must factor in thetime and resources of the organization that will need toimplement the improvements.The following case illustrates the simplicity, power,and effectiveness of this process.Credibility Testing in ActionIn the following paragraphs, I demonstrate how the sixstepcredibility testing process was put to use for smallbusiness Web sites and led to significant improvements.The small business Web site examined in this sectionwas chosen because it shares commonalities with manysmall business Web sites—including the two influencesdescribed above: it was created with a low-cost opensource program and is maintained by a few parttimeemployees with no prior experience in Web sitemaintenance or marketing.Overview of Web SiteOn A Lark (OAL) is a gift boutique that employs onefull-time manager, two part-time sales associates, andstudent workers throughout the academic year whoqualify for work-study awards. When the shop openedin fall 2009, the manager invested in a $50 open-access,flash-based Web site template from blu domain. Thestaff took pictures in the storage room with a personalcamera and went live with a Web site in one day.The store’s Web site, www.giftsonalark.com, is not ane-commerce site for two reasons. First, as a boutique, theproduct line is ever changing and products are purchasedin small quantity. Second, since OAL only has a smallstaff, the manager was concerned about the maintenanceand sustainability of the site, in particular productavailability and accuracy. Their intent was to have a Webpresence that showcased the store’s ambiance, location,and unique gifts and that drove consumer traffic to thestore and Facebook site.Step 1: Identify and Recruit ParticipantsPeople who were considered likely consumers of OALwere recruited for four focus group sessions. Two focusgroups consisted of 18- to 22-year-old female collegestudents. The other two focus groups consisted ofprofessional women ages 30 to 49. Of the four focusgroups, the participants for three of the focus groupswere recruited from the population of College of SaintBenedict, which is the college that owns and operatesOAL and which is located across the street from thestore. The fourth focus group included professionalwomen recruited from within one hour of the store.Of the 34 focus group participants, 17 had beento the retail site OAL; all 17 enjoyed the breadth anduniqueness of product as well as ambiance of the store—and 13 of those participants had made purchases fromOAL in the past. The remaining 17 participants had notheard of OAL before the credibility test. None of theparticipants had visited the Web site www.giftsonalark.com.Step 2: Determine Online Experiences andExpectationsBased on Fogg’s factors that influence Web credibilityjudgments, questions were asked to determine Webvisitor intent, expectations, motivation, and priorexperiences on the Web. The questions also addressedwhat Web visitors viewed as prominent elements of theWeb site as well as their interpretation of these elements.Questions included:• “Tell me what activities you do on the web and howoften you do them?”• “What might motivate you to visit the Web sitewww.giftsonalark.com?”122 Technical Communication l Volume 60, Number 2, May 2013
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Amateur Hour Credibility Testing for Small Business Web Sites

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