Investigating the Influence of the Landscape Preference of Blogs, User Satisfactory and Behavioral Intention

Blogs are a new type of media that have recently become popular users on the World Wide Web and have influence throughout society. Developing an explanatory theoretical model of website usability is pivotal for understanding usable website design. Such a model would explain and help predict the effects of website usability on online purchases, but few studies have been devoted to such model development. As an exploratory effort, we adopted and extended Kaplan´s landscape preference model by including factors of legibility, coherence, variety, and mystery, and examined their effect on cognitive and affective appraisals and their impact on behavioral intention, including word-of-mouth, continued intention, and complaint. A field survey with 280 online customers of websites was conducted to validate the research model. Our findings demonstrated that the proposed model explained a large amount of the variance of behavioral intention. Key implications for theory and practice are discussed. This study contributes to a theoretical understanding of the factors as landscape preference that affect the usage intention of blogs. Practically this study results provide blog service providers useful strategic insights and service guideline to enhance user´s intention of blogs.