In order to study the effects of web experience over a
range of service settings, the classification framework
developed by Lovelock [7] was used to select eight
services that served as settings for our study. The
Lovelock framework suggests that services can be
classified along two dimensions: 1) the extent to which
the characteristics of the service can be customized (e.g.,
legal services are customized to the needs of each
individual while fast-food meals lend themselves to very
little customization); and 2) the extent to which the
service employees are able to exercise judgment in
defining the nature of the service received by customers
(e.g., professors exercise a great deal of judgment during
service delivery while bank tellers exercise very little
judgment). Using two values (“high” and “low”) for each
of the two dimensions results in a four-cell classification
framework. Two services from each of the cells (for a
total of eight services) were selected to serve as the
settings for this study in order to provide a range of
different kinds of services.