Paddy Power – Website Review

This blog will review Paddy Power’s website in relation to the literature from Valacich, Parboteeah & Wells (2007). Paddy Power is a bookmaker based in the UK & Ireland and operates Ireland’s largest telephone betting service. Valacich, Parboteeah & Wells (2007) main aim was to prvoide a framework which could be used by web-site designers to improve the user experience for customers.

At first glance, the website appears to be interactive & engaging featuring a series of graphics which highlight the main gambling offers/promotions. Images are used merely for decorative purposes & the site appears to be easy to navigate, which is a fundemental component of web-site design (University of Leicester, 2017). One personal critism of the website would be that it is highly cluttered, which effects the design element of the site.

The research from Valacich, Parboteeah & Wells (2007) would identify the Paddy Power website as a ‘Hedonic Web-Site’. Hedonic Web Sites tend to focus heavily on the ‘representational delight’ element of web-site design, which mainly refers to the graphic design and what consumers see and hear from the web-site. Paddy Power and other gambling websites should use the research by Valacich, Parboteeah & Wells (2007) to understand that gambling consumers are mainly focusing on the ‘representational delight’ element of a website.

The other aspects of web-site design mentioned in the article focus on ‘structural firmness’ and ‘functional convenience’ (Valacich, Parboteeah & Wells, 2007). Structural firmness refers to the most basic need of a website such as response times and security elements, whereas functional convenience refers more to the ease of use and ease of navigation of the website.

Although these aspects are important to Paddy Power when designing a website, this blog would suggest that Paddy Power mainly focus on the ‘represntational delight’ element of their website, as this is essential when creating a Hedonic Web-Site (Valacich, Parboteeah & Wells, 2007). For Paddy-Power the structural firmness and functional convenience are fundementally important but the consumer would mainly be focusing on representational delight elements of Paddy Power’s interface.

References

Valacich, J., Parboteeah, D. & Wells, J. (2007) The online consumer’s hierarchy of needs, ACM, NEW YORK.

University of Leicester (2017) Evaluating Websites <https://www2.le.ac.uk/offices/ld/resources/study/eval-web>