Website Credibility

In this study, 2,684 people evaluated the credibility of two live Web sites as health or news).
We gathered the comments people wrote about each site's analyzed the comments to find out what features of a Web site get noticed credibility.
We found that the 'design look' of the site was mentioned most present in 46.1 percent of the comments. Next most common were comments structure and information focus.
In this paper we share sample participant areas that people noticed when evaluating Web site credibility.
We discuss prominence of design look, interpret the findings in light of Prominence-Interpretation and outline the implications of this research for Consumer WebWatch.

We found that when people assessed a real Web site's credibility they did not use rigorous criteria, a contrast to the findings of Consumer WebWatch's earlier national survey, A Matter of Trust: What Users Want From Web Sites, released April 16, 2002.

In this poll of 1,500 U.S. adult Internet users, people claimed that certain elements were vital to a Web site's credibility (e.g., having a privacy policy). But this most recent Web-based credibility study showed that people rarely used these rigorous criteria when evaluating credibility (e.g., they almost never referred to a site's privacy policy.) We found a mismatch, as in other areas of life, between what people say is important and what they actually do.

The data showed that the average consumer paid far more attention to the superficial aspects of a site, such as visual cues, than to its content. For example, nearly half of all consumers (or 46.1%) in the study assessed the credibility of sites based in part on the appeal of the overall visual design of a site, including layout, typography, font size and color schemes.

This reliance on a site's overall visual appeal to gauge its credibility occurred more often with some categories of sites than others. Consumer credibility-related comments about visual design issues occurred with more frequency with finance (54.6%), search engines (52.6%), travel (50.5%), and e-commerce sites (46.2%), and with less frequency when assessing health (41.8%), news (39.6%), and nonprofit (39.4%) sites.
In comparison, the parallel Sliced Bread Design study revealed that health and finance experts were far less concerned about the surface aspects of these industry-specific types of sites and more concerned about the breadth, depth, and quality of a site's information.

Article by Case Stevens, editor of the
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