The Role of Ecological Cognition for Supporting Webometrics: Towards “Serendipity Engineering for Seductive Hypermedia” and “User Analysis Using Socialnomics”

This chapter investigates the long-established ecological cognition framework and updates it to better account for the advances in digital transformation. To do this, two concepts are explored. The first, ‘serendipity engineering for seductive hypermedia’, looks at how to design information systems to account for the pleasant occurrences that happen in offline environments studied by those in sales and marketing where beneficial outcomes often occur by chance encounters. The second, ‘user analysis using socialnomics’, looks at how a parametric user model based on the ecological framework can be used to understand users of information systems from the point of view of supporting a digital economy of users. A number of additional equations are developed using socialnomics that can be applied to digital transformation based on the parametric user model, including to calculate probability of seduction and probability of serendipity in an information system. The parametric model presented has great applicability for information and communications technology solution providers.