A Quantitative Approach in Heuristic Evaluation of E-commerce Websites

TL;DR

This paper introduces a quantitative heuristic evaluation method for e-commerce websites based on the 8C model, utilizing web scraping and software tools to improve assessment accuracy.

Contribution

It develops a novel quantitative evaluation instrument for e-commerce websites by mapping 8C model dimensions to website elements and refining the process through iterative experiments.

Findings

Mapping revisions improved evaluation performance

Software effectively assesses e-commerce website quality

Conversion rate correlates with heuristic evaluation scores

Abstract

This paper presents a pilot study on developing an instrument to predict the quality of e-commerce websites. The 8C model was adopted as the reference model of the heuristic evaluation. Each dimension of the 8C was mapped into a set of quantitative website elements, selected websites were scraped to get the quantitative website elements, and the score of each dimension was calculated. A software was developed in PHP for the experiments. In the training process, 10 experiments were conducted and quantitative analyses were regressively conducted between the experiments. The conversion rate was used to verify the heuristic evaluation of an e-commerce website after each experiment. The results showed that the mapping revisions between the experiments improved the performance of the evaluation instrument, therefore the experiment process and the quantitative mapping revision guideline proposed was on the right track. The software resulted from the experiment 10 can serve as the aimed e-commerce website evaluation instrument. The experiment results and the future work have been discussed.