Designing usable online stores: A landscape preference perspective

Developing an explanatory theoretical model of website usability is pivotal for understanding usable website design. Such a model would explain and help predict the effects of website usability on online purchases, but few studies have been devoted to such model development. As an exploratory effort, we adopted and extended Kaplan's landscape preference model by including factors of legibility, coherence, variety, and mystery, and examined their effect on cognitive and affective appraisals and their impact on purchase intention. A field survey with 495 online customers using two different categories of websites was conducted to validate the research model. A multi-group analysis with gender and age was performed to cross-validate it. Our findings demonstrated that the proposed model explained a large amount of the variance of purchase intention, invariant across different subgroups. Key implications for theory and practice are discussed.