One important factor that determines the quality of web-based customer service is the ability of a firm’s website to provide individual caring and attention. In this sense, online vendors try to offer varieties of web-based personalization. However, many previous studies show that there is an obvious trade off between personalization and customer privacy. The main objective of this research is,...

In this chapter we describe WSDM, an audience-driven Web design method. WSDM was one of the first Web design methods and different from the other methods because of its audience-driven approach. Now the method is adapted to the use of Semantic Web technology and support the generation of semantically annotated web sites and web applications.

Distance education and web-based courses are mainstream in the United States higher education and growing (NCES, 2003) involving over 80% of four year public universities in 2002. The National Academy of Science review of ―how people learn‖ suggests that technology-mediated learning can be used to respond to students‘ preferences and related characteristics. This investigation of the relationsh...

Currently, researchers designing and implementing largescale overlay services employ disparate techniques at each stage in the production cycle: design, implementation, experimentation, and evaluation. As a result, complex and tedious tasks are often duplicated leading to ineffective resource use and difficulty in fairly comparing competing algorithms. In this paper, we present MACEDON, an infr...

Mass Customizers (MCs) often sell personalized products through Web Based Sales Configurators (WBSCs). Recently, a number of them have connected their WBSCs with Social Software Applications (SSAs). This is not surprising since SSAs provide an interactive and socially rich shopping experience, which makes shopping on WBSCs more similar to retail shopping experiences. Even though interaction wit...

Much of the work in today’s organizations is accomplished by distributed, or “virtual” project teams, rather than by work groups meeting in traditional faceto-face meetings. This paper investigates to what extent results from earlier GSS research are being applied to distributed environments, and to what extent more recent research in distributed GSS (DGSS) acknowledges and supports the evoluti...

Web-based electronic service (e-service) end-user adoption and implementation requires an assessment of consumer contextual factors. This paper investigates factors which affect end-user experience and perception, motivation, support, control, and usage frequency in the online/offline user task environment and its affect on web-based e-service adoption and implementation. Understanding end-user...

This study focused on the adoption of Web-based applications in the insurance industry. An indepth investigation of relevant literature on the technology adoption process and related issues, and the data collected from auto and life insurance companies identified several factors that affect e-insurance performance (in terms of both tangible and intangible benefits). Web site availability, organ...