Quality, value, satisfaction, trust, a

high score on every dimension to gain a high Ast score. These scales complement each other and
offer some clues on how to improve Web site design and presentation. All the results came from
data collected by undergraduate and graduate students from corporate and institutional Web sites
(Chen et al., 1999).
Chen et al. (2002) studied some selected web sites with Web development professionals and
online Web users in order to evaluate the scales linked to the attitude toward a Web site. Web
user’s interests were dramatically different from students’ interests used in the previous study:
This new set of sites produced higher correlations. Entertainment, Informativeness and
Organization reappeared even when site selection was done in terms of a single good/bad site
evaluation. However, correlations among the three dimensions and Ast changed meaningfully
with the type of respondents. For Web developers, informativeness was the best predictor
followed closely by organization, entertainment being far distant from them. Meanwhile, for the
university-based Web users, Informativeness is also the best predictor with value close to that of
professionals, followed by entertainment which is seven times higher than the one of
professionals, and finally organization which is the half of the value found for professionals.
Thus, a good site will be informative and well-organized but may or not be entertaining (high
Ast scores), whereas for low Ast scores, variances within Informativeness and Organization are
relatively large and Entertainment is low.
Chen et al. (2001) applied these scales to pharmacy sites. As Informativeness is an essential
factor in these sites, they did not differ much in informativeness value, causing higher correlation
and less variation than other types of Web sites. Another dimension, i.e., trust, should be added.
However, they found that Informativeness remained the key factor and Trust did not add any
predictive value to the dimensions of Ast. Consequently, a separate trust factor is rejected. Ast
remains reliable and unidimensional across changes in types of Web sites, respondents, and
methods of administration. The three factors accounted for most of the variance in Ast and these
three dimensions correlated with each other and with Ast significantly.
As previously seen in the ELM, informativeness is a central cue that impacts attitude, which
in turn influences purchase intention (De Pelsmacker et al., 1998). According to Chen (1999), as
informativeness is closely related to attitude toward a Web site, we expect to find a significant
relationship between these factors.
No research has been published on the influence of informativeness on consumers’
exploratory behavior. However, we can surmise that informativeness, characterized by the
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