nnulks' Blog: E Marketing 3 : Consumer Behavior in the Internet 2 : Technological Factor

Technology plays a greater role in the way consumer behaves. Though in E-Marketing theory it's explained only using connection speed, i consider many more technological constraints. They are discussed below -

1. Connection speed

Is the speed at which customer exchanges data in internet. There can be 3 main speed categories with their normal expectations

PDA, Smartphone - Only text
Dial up - Text with pictures
Broadband - Text, Pictures, Music, Video

When designing a web site, there are 3 ways to tackle this technological context

By designing for the slowest user (E.g.Google)
By having separate web pages for different speeds (E.g.cnnmobile.com)
By designing for the fastest user (E.g. You tube)

2. Browser compatibility

A browser is a software consumers use to view web pages. For e.g. Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Google chrome. Browsers have slightly different functional methods and they may load web pages in different ways. Web designers use different tactics to handle this. Usually they write codes to identify the browser type and customize the content.

3. Display resolution (For graphical needs)

This is mainly for the graphical users. For e.g. If you are into photography or video editing you may experience that a LCD monitor has better resolution than a CRT monitor. No.of colours shown, Depth of screen may change from monitor to monitor. So it might not be the same colours you see in one screen from another. We usually recommend clients to check how your designs are viewed from different types of monitors.

4. Add-on availability

I'm sure everyone has experienced this. How many times were you asked to download Adobe Flash Player to see that Web banner, and how many times were you asked to install Java runtime environment to upload photos to Facebook???

When having add-on using technologies in your web site you should always make sure you give an option to download it if consumer do not have that facility.

Next - We shall talk about socio-cultural factor effecting consumer behaviour online...