Understanding Web home page perception

A home page is the gateway to an organization's Web site. To design effective Web home pages, it is necessary to understand the fundamental drivers of user's perception of Web pages. Not only do designers have to understand potential users' frame of mind, they also have at their choosing a stupefying array of attributes – including numerous font types, audio, video, and graphics – all of which can be arranged on a page in different ways, compounding the complexity of the design task. A theoretical model capable of explaining user reactions at a molar level should be invaluable to Web designers as a complement to prevalent intuitive and heuristic approaches. Such a model transcends piecemeal page attributes to focus on overall Web page perceptions of users. Reasoning that people perceive the cyberspace of Web pages in ways similar to their perception of physical places, we use Kaplan and Kaplan's informational model of place perception from the field of environmental psychology to predict that only two dimensions: understanding of information on a Web page, and the involvement potential of a Web page, should adequately capture Web page perception at a molar level. We empirically verify the existence of these dimensions and develop valid scales for measuring them. Using a home page as a stimulus in a lab experiment, we find that understanding and involvement together account for a significant amount of the variance in the attitude toward the Web page and in the intention to browse the underlying Web site. We show that the informational model is a parsimonious and powerful theoretical framework to measure users' perceptions of Web home pages and it could potentially serve as a guide to Web page design and testing efforts.