Exploring the Total Customer Experience: Usability Evaluations of (B2C) E-Commerce Environments

The term Total Customer Experience (TCE) encapsulates the customer’s experience of interacting with an E-Commerce environment. With increasing competition in the E-Marketplace, creating value and generating a positive TCE is important for E-Commerce environments in order to attract and retain customers. Traditional usability evaluation techniques in HCI such as heuristic evaluations and controlled user-observations yield usability problems with the E-Commerce Web site but are unable to uncover factors that mar a customer’s TCE. In this workshop, our aim is to assess the current state of usability evaluation techniques and propose a toolbox of evaluation techniques adapted from HCI and other domains such as social psychology, consumer behavioural analysis and marketing that can be used to promote a positive TCE and foster customer retention.