Toward an understanding of consumer experience on the Internet: implications for Website design

The Internet is a fast growing medium that is quickly becoming a hub of communication, entertainment, and commerce. As the Internet´s importance grows, marketers are eager to understand the medium in order to use it effectively to promote exchanges. First, the paper reviews the flow construct as a means to describe online consumer behavior. It proposes a new paradigm for looking at the Internet by comparing the Internet to both traditional ways of communicating information and marketplace mechanisms, which are traditional means used to perform marketing functions. The scheme presented uses criteria commonly found in communications literature and criteria developed specifically for this comparison. Thus, the paper opens a new line of thought by recognizing that the Internet is not only a form of media and a method of communication, but a marketplace instrument in itself. The comparison exercises show that the Internet shares many similarities with marketplace mechanisms, and validates the need to use a broad perspective when thinking about the Internet. Also, the comparison exercise helps demonstrate what characteristics of the Internet facilitate the flow state, and offers suggestions for optimal Web site design.