A Services Theory Approach to Online Service Applications

From online multi-player games to Web search, the Web is now populated by a multitude of online applications. The main question we try to answer in this paper is which of those applications can be characterized as traditional services and therefore benefit from the concepts, techniques, and methods developed in traditional services theory. Our answer is to define online service applications as applications where (1) the user does not control most means of production; (2) the user is a significant part of the input to the production process. We then discuss how some traditional service techniques can be applied to online service applications by considering aspects of the design and evaluation of the human-computer interface (HCI) of online services.