User Experiences of the E-Commerce Site with Standard User Interface

Abstract

The future of economic competitiveness for most enterprises relies on entrance and active participation in the e-commerce market (Vestal, 1999). E-commerce offers speed, convenience and often cost-effectiveness for today’s busy shopper, but most e-commerce sites are still too hard to use. Zona Research (1999) found that 62% of online shoppers had given up at least once while looking for products, and 42% had turned to traditional channels to make their purchases. These statistics are astounding. In addition, according to Nielsen and Norman (2000), users fail when they try to purchase products on an e-commerce site about a third of the time. In reality, what happens is not just that the user fails, but that the site fails and does not sell a thing. Is “lost-in-hyperspace” primarily a psychological or an engineering problem? In other words, is “lost-in-hyperspace” a problem for users, or is it a symptom of poor design, which itself may be a psychological problem for authors of e-commerce sites?