Investigation of university websites from technology acceptance model and information architecture perspective: A case study

Abstract

Factors, such as whether a website is designed to be user-oriented beyond its mere visual design, its effectiveness and efficiency, its usability, and the organisation of the information it offers, have come to the fore once again after the Covid-19 pandemic. It has been evident that the link structure in a website, better known as the website's information architecture, helps the practitioners with identifying factors that affect the usability of a website. In this sense, practitioners must ensure that the information architecture supports the usage intentions of a websites' visitors to better serve and motivate them. However, in many cases, different types of users navigate websites that contain immense amounts of information, so understanding their needs is also important for practitioners. In parallel, this article addresses the problem that different visitors of a large-scale website will need to navigate through dense information to find the information they are looking for, and the information architecture of the website must support different user tasks for the website to be widely adopted. Thus, unlike previous studies, this article combines the principles of information architecture and the technology acceptance model to investigate the effect of information architecture on visitor's usage intentions. The work also guides practitioners in developing architectural strategies to better enable visitors to fulfil their objectives in the least amount of time.