Evaluating e-commerce environments: Approaches to cross-disciplinary investigation

Abstract

In our on-going e-commerce research programme, we are employing techniques from HCI, cognitive psychology, social psychology, and marketing and adapting them to investigate customer behaviour with e-commerce environments. Our aim is to investigate the influencing factors beyond the usability of the website that shape the customer's expectations and subsequent experience with e-commerce. In this paper, we propose an empirically-grounded model of customer's purchase and consumption behaviour (derived as a part of our research) that supports systematic choice of techniques for the customer-centred design and evaluation of e-commerce environments. Our aim is not to provide a handbook of techniques but to share experiences of applying complementary techniques for investigating different facets of customer behaviour with e-commerce. This paper is meant to serve as a resource for researchers and practitioners who are involved in research, design and evaluation of e-commerce environments.