Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Adaptive Systems and User Modeling on the WWW Web Assistants: Towards an Intelligent and Personal Web Shop Johan Åberg and Nahid Shahmehri Department of Computer and Information Science Linköping University, S-581 83 Linköping, Sweden phone: +46-13-281465, fax: +46-13-282666 e-mail: johab@ida.liu.se , nahsh@ida.liu.se url: Johan Åberg , Nahid Shahmehri Abstract: Electronic commerce has recently shown enormous potential to take over the sales market. There is a need to provide services that can reach individual computer users with different information profiles and levels of expertise. In this paper we introduce the novel concept of web assistants, human assistants working in an electronic web shop. This human- computer cooperation provides intelligent and personal services via an integrated communication media. A prototype of a web assistant system has been implemented. While browsing through the system the user can call for human assistance should the need arise. We present the results of a usability study performed on our prototype system. The results are encouraging especially when it comes to the attitude aspects of usability. The subjects were extremely enthusiastic about the concept of web assistants and its implications. Keywords: Adaptivity, electronic commerce, usability, www, data collection. 1 Introduction Web-based electronic commerce is just in its youth. Still, the amount of shopping on the web in the USA has been estimated to several billion US dollars for the Christmas of 1998. These figures illustrate the existence of a huge potential market for electronic commerce. Consequently the improvements on the service provided by web commerce systems will have large impact on sales figures and customer satisfaction. In spite of the apparently warm reception of electronic commerce, most people are not willing to base serious decisions on information or recommendations provided by a computer program. For example, in bank services or insurances customers need highly qualified help to decide what to buy. In such cases, when customers are about to make risky decisions the opinion of a human assistant may be very important as guidance [Friberg, 1998]. One reason for this is that automated services are not intelligent in the sense that they are very limited and do not allow the customer to have a dialogue and ask follow-up questions or ask for explanations [Mertens and Schumann, 1996]. People also tend to trust humans more than machines, at least when it comes to taking advice. Some experiments have shown that users have problems in placing the right level of trust in computer systems (e.g. [Bonsall and Joint, 1991]). If a user takes advice from a human assistant, the user at least has a name of someone to contact if anything goes wrong. Taking advice from a machine means that the responsibility situation is unclear. Sales assistants in ordinary shops have the ability to adapt to a customer's personal information needs and requirements. An example of this is when a sales person recognises a customer's decision style [Driver et al., 1993], and adapts his or her assistance accordingly [Perrault and Brousseau, 1989]. Another example is a sales person in a local convenience