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{Home > About > Centers & Programs > IAP > Fellowships : Roopa Sukumaran}

Roopa Sukumaran

This project was in some ways a natural progression from looking at the usability elements on a transactional site to the actual (textual) content on it. I drew on three different and yet related fields—captology, pragmatics, and Human Computer Interaction—in an effort to analyze the workings of the US Bank’s Home Mortgage and Small Business pages. Starting with the premise that a visitor’s engagement with a transactional site is also a conversation between the site and the visitor, the goal here was to use the three disciplines as a lens to evaluate these pages and identify patterns that met the logic of a successful and persuasive conversation. Recognizing these patterns would then help the bank model or re-model other Web pages to these successful patterns. The choice of the business segments (home mortgage and small business) was of course based on getting a sample of two different types of business. One must remember however that while recognition of patterns and modeling sites appropriately is important, one these models are also constantly evolving based on changing economic and cultural needs.