An Investigation into Usability Aspects of E-Commerce Websites Using Users’ Preferences

Abstract

We investigate the usability problems of e-commerce online shopping websites from user’s preferences and determine the relative importance of factors such as navigability, content, design, ease of use, and structure through user survey. The main intent of this ranking of web site characteristics is that a designer can relatively give higher efforts on designing features that may lead to higher merit and better usability. As such, our research work help us capture the data by involving user testing (usability testing) and open source automated tools such as Camtasia. Hence, the outcomes of the above approach show the navigation, content, design were the first, second, and third priority for evaluating the usability of e-commerce websites whereas ease of use and structure were the fourth and fifth features from the overall usability value calculation. There is a significant statistical difference between novice and expert users only for navigation feature. The maximum number of users feels satisfied with navigation, content, and design features whereas they are dissatisfied with ease of use and structural features of the websites.