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would need in their day-to-day work and asked them to try and find this information on the EUROPA Web site. In this study, the participants were professionals who used their computers and the Internet for work. The comment that made me think about carrying out a second, more in-depth study on the influence attitudes have on perceptions both online and offline came from an architect during an interview that followed the search task on the Web site. After a rather frustrating experience on the Web site, he remarked (here in the translated version of the original comment quoted previously): ‘I have tried quite a few things in order to understand the hierarchical structure. To me this Web site seems to represent the EU entirely. I think in reality it is also this confusing.’
This comment shows how much experiences made online can feed back into user perceptions of the offline institutions, businesses, organisations, or in more general terms, the communicators behind a Web site. For a subsequent study I wanted to look at a different group of users—those who have grown up with computers and the Internet and employ it more naturally, as a medium of everyday life rather than a technology that is primarily used in a work context: teenagers. In contrast to the professionals that took part in the first study, the idea was to come as close to eliminating problems that were caused by a lack of mastering the Internet or the search process as possible. And while the engineers and architects were experts in their profession, the majority of them had really only ‘learned’ to use computers and the Internet at a later stage in their lives, so that throughout the search process it was sometimes hard to determine whether the problems that arose were caused by the Web site or the skill level of the users.
Furthermore, this comment and other instances in the earlier study drew my attention to the importance of attitudes. It seemed that those participants who had a rather positive attitude towards the EU in general were less likely to get frustrated in their online search than those who were more critical. Due to the nature of the first study, however, attitudes were not included in the analysis and were merely picked up by chance in the empirical data so that it became clear that the influence of attitudes would need to be addressed more explicitly. In order to examine