رویکرد شبیه سازی نقشه شناختی برای تنظیم عوامل طراحی وب سایت های تجارت الکترونیک

The electronic commerce (EC) has been widely studied in the academic as well as practical fields. Especially, a lot of special topics regarding the EC such as B2C and B2B have been investigated in literature. However, there are much less studies about the EC sites themselves. Besides, only a few studies exist about the issues regarding how to adjust the design factors of the EC sites. The main objective of this study is to fill this research void by employing two techniques: (1) cognitive map and (2) linear structural relationship (LISREL). The cognitive map was used to operationalize the causal relationships among design factors of the EC sites, and investigate the simulation to find the optimal strategy of adjusting the design factors. The LISREL was performed to prove the proposed research model, where original Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) [Davis MIS Q. 13 (1989) 319] is adopted as a basic framework for providing causal relationships. Usable questionnaires were collected from 114 respondents who are proved to be qualified for this study. They were educated to surf two typical EC sites appropriately and tested before answering the questionnaires. Those respondents who completed questionnaires successfully were given a book coupon of 5$ equivalent. After LISREL experiments, the proposed research model was tested, and an adjacency matrix was induced which is to be used for the cognitive map simulation. With the adjacency matrix and 15 hypothetical market situations, the cognitive map simulations were successfully performed yielding that the proposed two techniques could be used for successfully adjusting the design factors of the EC sites under consideration in line with the changes in customers' tastes and market situations. One of the noticeable practical advantages of this study is that decision makers can identify the most relevant design factors and thereby allocate limited resources to them reasonably by performing the cognitive map simulation in advance before doing design adjustment to the EC sites in actuality.

The recent dramatic advent of the web sites presents new opportunities and challenges to establish, build, and manage customer relationships. Many marketing experts believe that the web sites are more conducive to relationship marketing than other targeted media, such as direct mail. The necessity of strengthening relationship marketing on the web sites makes it imperative for most of firms to understand the user's perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, behavioral intention to use the sites, and other cognition-related variables (Davis, 1989). Although books and articles abound concerning how to build the web sites, most published works are based on unsystematic opinions or personal experience, not on research. The web sites are offering a great potential to change the ground rules by which firms interact with their customers. Electronic commerce (EC) on the Internet is fueling the commercial use of the web sites much more. The web sites used for EC on the Internet are named herein the EC sites in the sequel. Through using the EC sites, customers can virtually traverse geographically dispersed sites using browser software, and make rational decisions on specific products and services. Perceived advantages of the EC sites are as follows: 1.They can allow extended market reach crossing geographic borders. 2. Client/server systems, software for cross-platform information processing, multimedia databases, and high resolution color displays, all of which are what the EC sites are equipped, enable even small firms to make their products and services appealing to potential customers worldwide. 3. Customers have a wider selection of brands. Meanwhile, customer's behavioral intention to purchase on the EC sites are influenced by atmosphere, functional service, information service, visual representation, service quality, and other factors that the design components (or user interface) of the EC sites are showing. Besides, customer's tastes are changing rapidly as well as market situations, which makes it imperative to maintain the EC sites timely. In other words, it is necessary to adjust the user interface or design components of the EC sites from time to time. Maintaining the EC sites properly according to the changes in users' tastes and market situations should be strictly based on rigorous research frameworks. Our research problem here is therefore to provide a research-based support in adjusting the design components of the EC sites in line with changes in market situations and user's tastes. To resolve this problem, this study addresses the need for a rigorous research model linear structural relationship (LISREL) to link the cognitive map simulation to adjusting the design components of the EC sites. The EC sites are now regarded as official cyber place for linking firms to on-line customers. They are being extensively used for creating and maintaining customer relationships on-line. Therefore, it is imperative for firms to adjust the design components of the EC sites, on a regular basis, according to the identified or anticipated changes in customer tastes and market situations. The problem to be solved here is that a number of design factors of the EC sites are interlinked with each other complicatedly via direct and indirect causal relationships. Without systematically investigating and analyzing that causality existent among those design factors, decision makers are not able to perform appropriate steps of simulation to adjust the EC sites. In this sense, we introduce a technique of cognitive map (Lee and Kim, 1997 and Zhang et al., 1994) to incorporate causality into adjusting the EC sites more satisfactorily. Therefore, we propose research objectives as follows: 1.To identify proper design components of the EC sites influencing outcome variables (or customer relationship) such as user satisfaction, and behavioral intention. 2.To propose a research model for designing and maintaining effective EC sites to help establish, build, and maintain outcome variables. 3. To examine causal relationships among design components and customer relationships by employing questionnaires survey and LISREL for statistical analysis. 4. To explore the cognitive map as a simulation vehicle for determining the optimal strategy of adjusting some design components of the EC sites in consideration of outcome variables. Research background is introduced in Section 2, where design factors and outcome variables are identified, and the need for cognitive map to fulfill our research objectives is discussed. In Section 3, research model is proposed with some theoretical backgrounds. Then, in Section 4, experiments with questionnaire data are addressed with discussion. This paper ends with concluding remarks in Section 5.

As the advent of the Internet age, the EC sites are becoming important tool for attracting customers and competing with competitors. Most of firms are now engaged in EC activities more or less, irrespective of B2C or B2B, because usage of the Internet is essential for a variety of management activities such as communication, marketing, procurement, and even manufacturing. However, for years since the birth of the web sites for commerce, firms' EC sites have been adjusted arbitrarily to incorporate changes in customer's tastes and market situations, resulting in poor performance. Although there exist many researches about web usability and design in the fields of web engineering and cognitive science, they were ignoring the strategic management aspect that the EC sites have. Therefore, this study was aimed at fulfilling this void regarding how to adjust the design of the EC sites optimally for the sake of ensuring better performance and improving user satisfaction and behavioral intention. The problem here is that those design factors comprising the EC sites are sophisticatedly interlinked with each other—slight changes in some factors might have an influence, positive or negative upon other factors via unknown causal relationships. We want to resolve this issue regarding how to adjust the design of the EC sites. Successful resolution of this issue will provide us with ability to adjust the EC sites systematically ensuring anticipated performance. We used two main techniques: (1) cognitive map for processing the causal relationships existent in a number of design factors of the EC sites, and (2) LISREL analysis for identifying the exact causality coefficients among them. In this sense, we proposed a research model as in Fig. 1, by adopting the metaphor of TAM. This way, the theoretical validity of the proposed research model's causality structure was ascertained. The empirical validity of the proposed research model's causality was also proved by performing questionnaires survey, and applying LISREL analysis. By using the typical EC sites in Korea which were awarded several times, we obtained an adjacency matrix, and conducted the cognitive map simulation yielding hypothetical situations where decision makers can find the best strategy of adjusting the design of the EC sites. Practical implications of our proposed approach were discussed in detail. The most prominent advantage of our approach is that decision makers using our approach can predict the chain of effects resulting from some changes in a part of design factors before making real changes to the EC sites. The cognitive map simulation makes it possible for decision makers to perform a lot of hypothetical situations which might occur in reality, detect a group of the most influential design factors, and allocate appropriate amount of resources to induce the optimal design adjustment strategy. This way, the firms can reduce the risk of changing the EC sites to a sufficient level. Nevertheless, the following future research issues remain to be solved: 1. More relevant design factors should be identified and incorporated in the research model. 2.Original TAM or modified TAM needs to be applied rigorously to make it clear which kind of causality relationships exist among design factors of the EC sites.