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This paper describes and discusses the application of various state-of-the-art techniques to improve the design and usability of a web application in the B2C area. It is illustrated by the ongoing project of developing an intelligent destination recommender system (DieToRecs). These techniques comprise four particular evaluation steps: I. a concept test, 2. a cognitive walkthrough, 3. a heuristic evaluation, and 4. an experimental evaluation by system users. Each section (i.e. evaluation step) addresses three areas of interest: a) the starting situation and objective, b) a short description of the applied method and the procedure, c) a brief summary of the results and the lessons learned for the general use of evaluative techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on the use of 'co-operative evaluation' to investigate tourists' decision making behaviours when using Internet resources. Co-operative evaluation is a qualitative 'think-aloud' technique used to investigate usability problems in interactive systems. In this study, the technique is adapted to examine both interaction problems and decision-making activities of subjects attempting to plan a weekend break to Paris, The results show that existing general accounts of decision-making in e-commerce are not sufficiently rich to describe decision behaviours in tourism. Also, these accounts may be enhanced by reference to descriptions of tourism decision-making that pre-date the development of e-commerce. The findings also suggest that many existing web-based tools to support tourism decision-making are poorly matched to the needs of Internet users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper outlines a theoretical framework for the discussion and identification of indicators measuring the properties of web sites. In this framework we distinguish between the web site as a medium for describing an object, the web site as an object of description and the normative judgement of a web site. The framework is the basis for a project currently carried out. It aims to establish indicators for tourism web sites and use them in an open benchmarking process to enforce the improvement of the set of independent web sites marketing a given tourist destination both individually and as a resource in the collective presentation of the destination. The case studied is the Sognefjord region in Western Norway. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Testing user models empirically in a rigorous way does not seem to be a very common and wide-spread activity (Chin, 2001). This study is intended to contribute to this field of research by investigating the effect of adapting the graphical user interface to the user's cognitive style. 176 test persons were assigned to four groups of a 2-by-2 experimental design and inspected the demonstrator of a Web-based travel recommendation system. The basic premise that this type of a user adaptive counseling system is more appreciated by the user than a conventional rigid user interface could be affirmed by this study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]