ENHANCING THE CLIENT EXPERIENCE OF AN E-COMMERCE SITE USING EYE-TRACKING TECHNOLOGIES

摘要

In 2015, France had more than 157,300 e-commerce sites. Competition is therefore becoming stronger. In addition to entailing a drastic change in household consumption (absence of physical contact during the purchase), the amount of credit card hacking has strongly increased since the arrival of e-commerce on the market. As a consequence, trust becomes relatively difficult to establish between the cyber-buyers and e-commerce sites. In this paper, we want to report on our experience with a start-up that is selling its products through an e-commerce site, and that is facing the difficulty of both attracting the cyber-buyers and ensuring the purchase. We worked on the definition of a methodology to evaluate the quality of the information delivered to the client. Thanks to a literature search, we found that eye-tracking technology can be very interesting in order to understand the behaviour of the cyber-buyer. By following in real time the eye-gaze of a user, we can analyse the gaze trajectory both during the readings and the search for information to better understand how the interface is used and if the ergonomics of the website or internet page are well done. We obtained several heat maps that illustrate the gaze trajectory made by a panel of cyber-buyers: the red clouds represent areas where users looked the most, whereas yellow clouds indicate fewer views, followed by the least-viewed blue areas. Grey areas didn't attract any fixations. Thanks to that kind of analysis, we can identify problems of understanding, ergonomics and the cognitive strategies of a user. To achieve this objective, we decided to create a grid that combined the user's and the company's points of view and a literature search to highlight the most pertinent criteria to evaluate the quality of the information put on an e-commerce site. The methodology is called ETGSCE or 'Eye-Tracking Grid for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Customer Experience'. The deployment of the proposed methodology is illustrated through a panel of 41 participants. The participants were chosen because of the target market addressed by our start-up. We evaluated for different pages of the site (welcome page, product pages and category pages), the zones with a real interest for the cyber-buyer and also its behaviour when searching for information on the site. The finding of the eye-tracking survey and its analysis thanks to the grid are very important for the start-up. Indeed, we were able to verify if the web-marketing strategy selected by the start-up is pertinent regarding its targets and if the aspects that the start-up wanted to promote are really perceived by the average cyber-buyer. Finally, our work leads to concrete recommendations to promote greater use of the site and improve visitor experience using the client experience.