Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by HCI@UBC. Given that an ecommerce web site is a company’s “window to the world”, customers interact directly with a number of information technology artifacts provided by the company (such as, product recommendation software, videos for product presentations) as well as entities within that company (such as, sales assistants) and other customers (such as, collaborative shopping) via information technology mediated channels. HCI design and evaluation in this specific context have two major components: 1) the first resembles traditional HCI work in that a customer has to interact with a computer interface to reach the online company, and 2) the second is about communication between the customer and the company that is necessary for trading to occur. The first type of interaction is designed to enhance customers’ efficiency, effectiveness and shopping enjoyment by providing high quality information technology-based services, and the second type of interaction, or more correctly communication, is intended to improve customers’ trust in online merchants, reduce their perceived risks of buying on the web, and increase their loyalty to web merchants and commitment to online shopping. We have conducted over 20 studies with my colleagues and graduate students over the last decade investigating a wide range of topics that included: how to improve product understanding on the web; how to provide services to customers via IT support; improving customers’ purchase quality via recommendation agent use, designing product recommendations agents that are trustworthy, and designing social interfaces to such agents; collaborative shopping; and reducing risk and deception in electronic commerce. The talk will provide a brief summary of these studies and their findings, and describe their practical implications for HCI designers and users of electronic commerce for improving the online shopping experiences of customers.
About the Speaker
Izak Benbasat is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and CANADA Research Chair in Information Technology Management at the Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia, Canada.
His current research interests include: investigating the methods for customer service provision on the Internet (business-to-consumer, business-to-business, and citizen-to-government); evaluating product recommendation agents used in electronic commerce to support consumers including those for social shopping networks; designing methods to help reduce risk and deception in electronic commerce; and safeguarding users’ privacy in social shopping networks. This work is supported by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and the University of British Columbia Hampton Grants.
Select Articles Available at UBC
Benbasat, Izak, (2013). A contingency approach to investigating the effects of user-system interaction modes of online decision aids. Information systems research. 24 (3), pp.861 – 876. [Link]
Benbasat, Izak, (2013). Integrating service quality with system and information quality. Information systems research. 24 (3), pp.861 – 876. [Link]
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