Defining prerequisites for banking web site design: the wow! approach

Being involved in the development of a high standing Web site without having the necessary amount of money, we came to the idea of creating a set of basic features that Web sites should inevitably have in order to meet customers quality basic expectations. The paper reports on the development of the methodology created to face the research question. The result is an innovative methodology called WoW!-Welcome on the Web!. The theoretical framework traces back to Herberg’s motivation-hygiene theory and to the Kano model. They both propose that products and services should meet a set of basic quality features of customers. These are the “features that provide basic quality, such as preconditions or antecedents for user satisfaction to occur” (Zhang and Von Dran 2002). As the main characteristics of hygienic and basic quality expectations is unconsciousness, we thought to observe the actions performed by users so that we could deduce what are such factors. The developed methodology considers five main user actions when surfing a Web site: direct access; indirect access; home page visualization; surfing; personal data submission. Starting from them indicators and measurement criteria were deduced so that the prerequisites could be observed. Gemmo, Bissola, Carignani Defining Prerequisites for Banking Web Site