HOMEPAGE GENRE DIMENSIONALITY
Terry Ryan, Richard Henning Field, Lorne Olfman · Journal of the Association for Information Systems · 2002
Prior theory stipulates that three dimensions can explain the appearance of electronic media genres: content, form, and function.This paper reports an analysis of subjective groupings of U.S. state government homepages to determine if the three dimensions do in fact underlie the visual appearance of this genre.Homepage images were collected-one per state per year for all available states for 1998-2001-from a publicly available archive of Web sites.Subjects sorted the images for each year into groups according to perceived similarities.Multidimensional scaling was used to identify dimensions that account for the groupings.The empirically derived dimensions were examined in light of theoretical expectations.A four-dimensional solution was found to fit the data, the first three dimensions of which correspond to content, form, and function.Directions for future research are discussed.