Media perceptions and their impact on Web site quality

The growth of the Internet has created an explosion of sites that seek to provide information and conduct business transactions. The service industry and especially online banking stand to gain from that development. This study, anchored in the marketing, social psychology, media, and information systems literature, investigates how users perceive the Internet’s abilities to conduct banking activities. Results show variation in media perceptions for the same online banking site across various task environments. The results indicate that user perceptions of the Internet medium depend on task complexity and that technology can serve as a mitigating factor to improve media and quality perception.