There's been quite a bit written on interactivity. Below is a selection of sources that discuss interactivity's conceptual dimensions (Bucy, Stromer-Galley) and a few that have used scales and measurements of various sorts (Sundar). Some of McMillan's work for example measures of perceptions of interactivity (and the difficulties of such). Others offer suggestions of features that might be present that would suggest interactivity. Foot & Schneider's book operationalizes interactive features on websites in a political context. Best of luck, ~Jenny Bucy, E. (2004). Interactivity in society: Locating an elusive concept. The Information Society, 20(5), 373-383. Foot, K, & Schneider, S. M. (2006). Web campaigning. Cambridge: MIT Press. Heeter, C. (1989). Implications of new interactive technologies for conceptualizing communication. In J. L. Salvaggio & J. Bryant (Eds.), Media use in the information age: Emerging patterns of adoption and computer use (pp. 217-235). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. McMillan, S. J. (2002a). Exploring models of interactivity from multiple research traditions: Users, documents, and systems. In L. Lievrouw & S. Livingstone (Eds.), The handbook of new media (pp. 163-182). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. McMillan, S. J. (2002b). A four-part model of cyber-interactivity. New Media & Society, 4, 271-291. McMillan, S. J., & Hwang, J.-S. (2002). Measures of perceived interactivity: An exploration of the role of direction of communication, user control, and time in shaping perceptions of interactivity. Journal of Advertising, 31(3), 29-42. Stromer-Galley, J. (2000). On-line interaction and why candidates avoid it. Journal of Communication, 5(4), 111-132. Stromer-Galley, J. (2004). Interactivity as process and interactivity as product. The Information Society, 20(5), 391-394. Stromer-Galley, J., & Foot, K. (2002). Citizens perceptions of online interactivity and implications for political campaign communication. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 8(1). Sundar, S. S. (2004). Theorizing interactivity's effects. The Information Society, 20(5), 385-389. Sundar, S. S., Kalyanaraman, S., & Brown, J. (2003). Explicating Web site interactivity: Impression formation effects in political campaign sites. Communication Research, 30(1), 30-59.

Dear All,

I'm investigating how website attributes impact users' behaviour in the context of social campaign. A pilot study I conducted found a number of results: that usability, design, credibility and the quality of interactive applications were associated with more active users. Moving to the next stage, I wanted to develop attribute based evaluation scales I could use to assess website's credibility, usability, degree of interactivity and content quality. Ideally, I'd like to avoid systems that require human judgement and develop scales that ask: does it have X, does it have Y, is it missing Z. And from these come to a basic ranking of sites' usability, credibility, etc...

I'm now pooling sources and was wondering if anyone knows about any 'tried and tested' scales which measure the above web attributes and have proven successful in the past; have suggestions on good frameworks from which to base such scales; or general thoughts on using attribute based scales to evaluate websites?

Any advice is appreciated,

Brian

-------------------- Brian Cugelman Statistical Cybermetrics Research Group University of Wolverhampton b.cugelman@wlv.ac.uk http://cybermetrics.wlv.ac.uk <http://cybermetrics.wlv.ac.uk/>

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-- Assistant Professor Department of Communication, SS 340 University at Albany, SUNY 1400 Washington Ave. Albany, NY 12222 518-442-4873 jstromer@albany.edu http://www.albany.edu/~jstromer