Towards an E-Service Trust Framework for Design Quality

The extant trust related research literature is vast and highly diverse. Trust has been studied from each and every angle: in the philosophical, sociological, psychological, computer scientific, economic, and legal sense – just to name a few. The contribution offered here addresses trust from a semiotic viewpoint, in relation to e-service contexts of use. A novel semiotics of e-trust is presented and supported through the application of an EST (E-Service Trust) Framework. Supportive evidence is presented in the form of both empirical user studies and through the application of an inductive research method. The main focus of the work is business-to-consumer (B2C) e-service encounters with a further contribution being offered with respect to collaborative Virtual Organisational (VO) e-service contexts. The empirical evidence presented is derived from consumer e-service encounters with several prominent e-banking sites based in the United Kingdom. The empirical results are presented from e-service user encounters namely: with home-page content extracted on to cards, as well as from direct on-line e-service encounters.