Functionality describes the various functions, features and services available on a website (Huizing, 2000). These elements are of great importance, because they can influence the perceived usefulness of a website by helping users during their visit. The Technology Acceptance Model (Davis, 1989) shows that such a higher perceived usefulness has a positive impact on the actual usage of the website which will obviously impact conversion rates (Hong and Tam, 2006). Creemers (1998) and various others (e..g. Bakker et al., 2001; Ives and Learrmonth, 1984) also confirm that functionality has a high strategic impact, because it influences user satisfaction and perceived service quality (Cenfetelli & Benbasat, 2002). It is therefore very important that the functionality provided on a website is sufficient to guide users towards conversion.
Using an expert review, the website content influencing functionality can be analyzed and compared to other websites. Such a content analysis has been used in various marketing and advertising research to analyze a variety of (written) documents (Liao et al., 2006). The choice of websites that are compared is of great importance when doing such an expert review, because the products offered can have different characteristics. For example, hardware requires a different approach than movies, because of its missing physical nature within web shops. But, when the proper websites and analysis tool are chosen, a content analysis is one of the best ways to identify missing functionality. In this article I will introduce an example case in which the functionality of a website has been analyzed using the ScanYours Webscan. Read more »
A while ago, I blogged here about my research into social media use and knowledge sharing. I will now come back to you with a series of blogs discussing the results of this research. In this blog, I will discuss which social media proved to be most popular and what we like about them.
Which social media do we use?
On average we use 2 social media tools in our work, with individual cases ranging from 0 to 12 tools. Which social media we use can be seen in table 1 below, showing the number and percentage of respondents using a certain tool. LinkedIn is by far the most used social media tool for work purposes; 69% of respondents indicated to use this tool. Other popular tools are Twitter, Facebook and Yammer. Users of Twitter gather the most connections.
| Tool |
# |
% |
| Clearvale |
7 |
2.8 |
|
50 |
19.8 |
|
| Hyves |
12 |
4.7 |
|
175 |
69.2 |
|
|
82 |
32.4 |
|
| Yammer |
46 |
18.2 |
Table 1: Used social media tools
Facebook recently launched its timeline functionality to the world which the service announced back in September at their yearly F8 event. For a couple of months only developers had the opportunity to explore this new profile functionality, which resulted in millions of users becoming ‘developers’. The timeline shows all your Facebook activity from the moment you started using the service and it even allows you to add events before that. Or as Facebook describes:
Tell your life story with a new kind of profile Read more »
De Webscan: RedBlue IT onder de loep
16-12-'11 Veel bedrijven laten op het gebied van online communicatie kansen liggen. (Potentiële) klanten verlaten de website weer snel, gaan niet over tot aankoop of het opnemen van contact met het bedrijf, of verlaten het aankoopproces. Om een antwoord te vinden op de vraag hoe bezoekers beter bediend kunnen worden is de Webscan ontwikkeld. In deze webscan neemt ScanYours de website van RedBlue onder de loep!
De ScanYours Webscan
Binnen de gelederen van RedBlue, een IT-detacheerder met als specialisaties SAP en Oracle, werken roodgekleurde(Oracle) en blauwgekleurde (SAP) consultants aan krachtige IT oplossingen voor hun toonaangevende klanten.
Een kleine greep uit hun portfolio:
- Alliander
- Ministerie van Defensie
- Rabobank
- Politie
- Sanquin bloedvoorziening
- Philips
- A&O Services
- Shell
Sinds de oprichting van RedBlue, gevestigd in Hoofddorp, maakt het bedrijf een gedegen groei door. Openheid, plezier, professionaliteit en specialisatie zijn de kernwaarden waar de organisatie de werkwijze op stoelt. Via de Webscan wordt de website van RedBlue onder de loep gelegd.
De webscan: hoe effectief is uw website?
28-11-'11
Auteur: Jerry van Leeuwen Organisaties besteden tegenwoordig veel tijd en budget aan zoekmachinemarketing en social media. Het doel hierbij is om potentiële klanten te vinden en te verleiden om naar hun eigen website te komen. Eenmaal op de website aangekomen is het essentieel dat de website daadwerkelijk biedt wat de klant nodig heeft om tot een keuze te komen. Merkwaardig genoeg laten veel websites hier kansen liggen. Het gevolg is dat veel bezoekers de website vroegtijdig verlaten en naar de website van een concurrent te gaan. Om een antwoord te vinden op de vraag hoe bezoekers beter kunnen worden bediend is de Webscan ontwikkeld. De Webscan is een objectieve benchmarkmethode die gericht laat zien wat u kunt doen om uw klanten beter te bedienen zodat ze op uw website blijven en eerder tot actie overgaan (kopen, contact opnemen, informatie downloaden). Dit leidt aantoonbaar tot een hogere klanttevredenheid en een website met een hogere conversiekracht. Read more »
Er is vanuit de kinderopvangbranche en de beroepsvereniging directeuren kinderopvang (bdKO) veel belangstelling in de mogelijkheden die social media bieden binnen de kinderopvang. Naar aanleiding van deze belangstelling en de vraag om ondersteuning heeft ScanYours in opdracht van bdKO onderzoek gedaan onder 4500 ouders in de Randstad over het gebruik van social media binnen de kinderopvang. Dit onderzoek vormde de basis voor een social media pilot bij kinderopvangorganisatie Ludens in Utrecht over de mogelijkheden van nieuwe media binnen de kinderopvang. In dit artikel worden de ervaringen, resultaten en social media richtlijnen voor de kinderdagopvang en buitenschoolse opvang besproken.
Gebruik van sociale media kanalen door ouders uit de randstad met kinderen op de kinderdagopvang
De resultaten van het onderzoek: Social Media binnen de kinderopvang
De resultaten van het onderzoek en de ervaringen van de pilot hebben een duidelijk inzicht gegeven in de kansen en valkuilen van nieuwe media binnen de kinderopvang. Read more »
After the news by Nik Cubrilovic that Facebook keeps tracking cookies after users log out, I decided to make a small extension to remove these cookies automatically. The extension provided in this article is triggered when users visit a website in Google Chrome or Chromium. Once triggered, it will remove all cookies set by Facebook if it detects that you have logged out from it. By removing these cookies, it is no longer easily possible to track you while you browse on other pages on the web. Although the extension is not optimized yet (the code could probably be shorter and execution somewhat faster), the extension has been tested on several machines and it seems to work great. Read more »
I have been working for many years with the Gnome 2 shell now, but the recent positive reviews on Unity and Gnome 3 have also reached me. As I am not a huge fan of Unity for variety of reason (including its lay-out and lack of customization), I have decided to try out Gnome 3 within Ubuntu. Since Gnome 3 is finally ‘supported’ for Ubuntu, the method of upgrading Gnome has slightly changed. Using the second beta of Ubuntu I have written this small article so everyone install Gnome 3 within Ubuntu. Read more »
Under Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) I have been using PlayOnLinux for a while to install a variety of Windows programs (for example: Internet Explorer 7). After my upgrade from the 10.x Ubuntu series to the newest 11.04 version, I noticed that I was no longer able to install any programs within PlayOnLinux. The Ubuntu repositories offer version 3.8.8 of PlayOnLinux (at the moment of writing) resulting in the message ‘Sorry, PlayOnMac 2.5 and PlayOnLinux 3.8 are no longer supported.’ when attempting to install software. This short blog describes how you can update your PlayOnLinux version to the newest 4.x series that works correctly under Ubuntu 11.04. Read more »
As a web developer, I am constantly aware of the problem that every browser seems to have a mind of its own when rendering a webpage. Especially earlier versions of Internet Explorer are a big problem for a lot of developers as these browsers were not updated with new options and/or visual fixes (only security updates). As a result, most web developers want to test their creations in various versions of Internet Explorer to make sure that everyone can experience their website as intended. Earlier, I wrote an article that explained how you can run Internet Explorer 7 under Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx. However, the package provided by PlayForLinux seems to be broken now and I had to find a new way to test websites before putting them online. In this blog I will explain a new method that actually runs Windows within Ubuntu enabling developers to exactly mimic the conditions of real users. Read more »
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