The Nature and Role of User Beliefs Regarding a Website's Design Quality

Researchers and practitioners have long been interested in identifying the criteria that users consider important in assessing whether a system is worth using. However, past research in this domain has not taken into account the characteristics of a system's design and their quality in a systematic and comprehensive manner, which is likely to have limited the development of actionable design guidelines. The article addresses this issue by suggesting a research model that links user beliefs-which have traditionally been used in IT acceptance and success research (i.e., information quality, system quality, usefulness, and ease of use)-to their beliefs regarding the quality of three categories of a system's design (i.e., visual quality, page layout quality, and navigation quality) and testing it in the context of organizational intranets. The analysis of data collected from 159 intranet website users in three organizations supported the model, suggesting that the three categories of design quality beliefs significantly influenced users' assessment of their system's information quality and system quality.