Online Store Aesthetics Impact Efficacy of Product Recommendations and Highlighting.

Owing to high competition in e-commerce, customers may prefer sites that ensure that good user experience (UX) and website aesthetics are one of its qualities. The method of presenting items seems crucial for gaining and maintaining user attention. We conducted a task-based user eye-tracking study with n = 30 participants to examine two variants of an online fashion store: one based on aesthetic rules and one defying them. The following aspects of item presentation were considered: height and width the ratio of product photos, website colors, rounded borders, text visibility, spacing between elements, and smooth animation. We investigated their relationship to user attention by analyzing gaze fixation, tracking user interest, and conducting a supplementary survey. Experimental results showed that owing to following the rules of aesthetics in interface design in the presented fashion shopping scenario, elements such as the recommendation area and product highlights had a significant positive impact on customer attention.

Attempts to Attract Eyesight in E-Commerce May Have Negative Effects.

E-commerce shop owners often want to attract user attention to a specific product to enhance the chances of sales, to cross-sell, or up-sell. The way of presenting a recommended item is as important as the recommendation algorithms are to gain that attention. In this study, we examined the following types of highlights: background, shadow, animation, and border, as well as the position of the item in a 5 × 2 grid in a furniture online store, and their relationships with user fixations and user interest. We wanted to verify the effects highlighting had on attracting user attention. Various levels of intensity were considered for each highlight: low, medium, and strong. Methods used for data collection were both implicit and explicit: eye tracking, tracking cart's contents, and a supplementary survey. Experimental results showed that a low-intensity background highlight should be the first-choice solution to best attract user attention in the presented shopping scenario, resulting in the best fixation times and most users' selections. However, in the case of the highest-intensity animations, highlighting seemed to have negative effects; despite successful attempts to attract eyesight and a long fixation time, users did not add the highlighted products to cart.

Gaze and Event Tracking for Evaluation of Recommendation-Driven Purchase.

Recommendation systems play an important role in e-commerce turnover by presenting personalized recommendations. Due to the vast amount of marketing content online, users are less susceptible to these suggestions. In addition to the accuracy of a recommendation, its presentation, layout, and other visual aspects can improve its effectiveness. This study evaluates the visual aspects of recommender interfaces. Vertical and horizontal recommendation layouts are tested, along with different visual intensity levels of item presentation, and conclusions obtained with a number of popular machine learning methods are discussed. Results from the implicit feedback study of the effectiveness of recommending interfaces for four major e-commerce websites are presented. Two different methods of observing user behavior were used, i.e., eye-tracking and document object model (DOM) implicit event tracking in the browser, which allowed collecting a large amount of data related to user activity and physical parameters of recommending interfaces. Results have been analyzed in order to compare the reliability and applicability of both methods. Observations made with eye tracking and event tracking led to similar results regarding recommendation interface evaluation. In general, vertical interfaces showed higher effectiveness compared to horizontal ones, with the first and second positions working best, and the worse performance of horizontal interfaces probably being connected with banner blindness. Neural networks provided the best modeling results of the recommendation-driven purchase (RDP) phenomenon.