Class today discussed the seven elements of customer interface that we talked about for our first group project. They are: context, content, community, customization, communiction, connection, and commerce. We then went into each one a bit more specifically:
- context: site layout and design
- content: text, pics, sound, and video that webpages contain
- community: the ways sites enable user-to-user communication
- customization: site’s ability to self-tailor to different users or to allow users to personalize the size
- communication: the ways sites enable site-to-user communication or 2-way communication
- connection: degree site is linked to other sites
- commerce: site’s capabilities to enable commerce
Then we talked about what determines the Look-and-Feel of Design:
context: look-and-feel of a screen-to-face customer interface
dimensions of context: function and asthetics
function: factors critical in site layout: section breakdown, linking structure, etc.
What are the dimensions of content?:
content refers to any digital information included on a website, e.g. audio, video, images, text
-offering mix
- appeal mix
- multimedia mix
- content type
Why community:
- sense of community can encourage customers to return to a website primarily because:
community can create attractive content, community can make common activities possible or easier thus satisfying needs not attainable individually
What are the levers used to customize a site?
- customization: to better address individual needs, a site can be altered by the user or organization
- dimensions of customization: personality tailoring
What types of communication can a firm maintain with its customer base?
- communication refers to the dialogue that is initiated by the firm
- dimensions of communication: broadcast, interactive, hybrid
How does a firm connect with other businesses?
- connection is the degree to which a given site is able to “link” to other sites through a hypertext jump or hyperlink, from one webpage to another
-dimensions of connection: links to sites, homesite background, outsourced content, percent of homesite content, pathway of connection
Dimensions of commerce:
- registration
- shopping cart
- security
- credit card approval
- one-click shopping
- orders through affiliates
- configuration technology
- order tracking
- delivery options