Informational Social Influence, Belief Perseverance, and Conservatism Bias in Web Interface Design Evaluations

Abstract

The ability to accurately measure the quality of a web interface design is critical if organizations hope to make effective decisions about their websites. Since websites are often the most publically visible face of an organization, website-related decisions can have profound impacts on the organization's prospects for success. Prior research involving web interface quality assessments has typically considered those judging an interface to be independent actors who are making decisions in a situation that is free of social influence. In real-world settings, however, website designs are frequently evaluated by groups, rather than isolated individuals. To that end, this article seeks to provide insights into the effects that group-related cognitive biases may have on web interface design assessments. Specifically, by using a controlled, randomized experiment involving more than 500 research subjects, it is shown that judges' web interface ratings can be easily manipulated by social influence phenomena, and that people assessing web interfaces in a social context are highly susceptible to informational social influence, belief perseverance, and conservatism bias. Given that these phenomena can all serve as significant sources of measurement error, and given the importance of being able to accurately measure the quality of a website design, the findings of the study suggest that organizational web interface design evaluations should be deliberately performed by individual judges in an environment that is free from social influence.

Keywords

• Belief perseverance
• conservatism bias
• informational social influence
• interface evaluation
• web interface design