17. READABILITY— 3.6% OVERALL

A small number of people's comments, 3.6% of the total, mentioned the readability of the Web Site as a credibility issue. Sites that were unreadable — for whatever reason — lost credibility points. Sample comments are below:

• The format was easier for me to read. — M, 52, Pennsylvania

• The page is not easily readable. The font "Courier" contributed to this. — M, 40, Austria

Readability comments, by site category

As illustrated in Figure 22, less than four percent (3.6%) of all site evaluations referred to comments about site readability — that is, how easy or hard it was for a user to read a site's Web pages. This occurred more frequently in the sports (5.7%), search engines and entertainment categories (3.8%, each), and less frequently in the news (3.0%), opinion or review (2.8%), and e-commerce (0.4%) categories. Nonprofit sites did not provoke a single comment relating to readability issues.

Figure 22: Percentage of comments relating to readability, by category.

— 3.4% OVERALL

In 3.4% of the comments, people claimed a site won credibility by showing an affiliation with an organization they knew and trusted. Below are sample comments:

• Affiliation with a prestigious university adds to a sense of objectivity. — F, 27, California

• Credibility increased by seals of approval from known companies. — F, 21, Virginia

Affiliations comments by site category

As shown in Figure 23, financial affiliations, support, and partnerships did not affect site evaluators very much as they assessed the credibility of the sites in this study. A mere 3.4% of all evaluations included comments about this issue. This occurred slightly more frequently in the nonprofit (7.2%), health (5.6%), and search engines (4.8%) categories, and slightly less frequently in the travel (3.3%), finance (2.7%), e-commerce (2.6%), and news (1.7%) categories.

Figure 23: Percentage of comments relating to affiliations by category.

What we find notable about Affiliations

Although few comments mentioned issues of affiliation, it's interesting to see that nonprofit Web Sites led the pack in these types of comments, followed by health sites. In these and other categories the comments showed that at least some people used a site's affiliation — good or bad — as a cue about whether or not the site was credible. An odd result here is that news sites generated so few comments about affiliation, suggesting that people in our study didn't view affiliation of news sites as a credibility issue.

Back to start of the article: A Good Web Site Design Brings Trust and Success

Continue with:

• Why is Design Look so prominent?
  
• ENTERTAINMENT Web Sites: CREDIBILITY RESULTS
  
• HEALTH Web SiteS: CREDIBILITY RESULTS
  
• NONPROFIT Web SiteS: CREDIBILITY RESULTS
  
• TRAVEL Web SiteS: CREDIBILITY RESULTS