Optimizing the user experience of an e-commerce website (usability focus)

Abstract

The development of an e-commerce website is crucial considering the nature of SME's daily business and its importance to face the competition. Besides their brick and mortar presence, most of today’s companies are working on their digital prints by searching for ways to enhance the experience of their online shopper. Today’s users’ expectations are continuously growing and evolving, thus building an interface that only relies on product offering is not enough anymore. It is now about implicitly luring the user to the product by implementing user experience and usability techniques and guidelines. Therefore, Etilux has decided to join the digital wave by looking for ways to improve their e-commerce website and satisfy their users. Through this project, we were able to answer our research questions and understand the key building blocks of a usable website and positive user experience. This has been achieved through a literature review that represents our theoretical context and starting ground. Then, a benchmark analysis was realized alongside the most performant online competitors, this gave us an overview of the best used practices. Finally, a qualitative study through in-depth interviews was carried out with 20 experts in the field. Summarizing our findings, we represent the guidelines in terms of two models to follow in order to create a positive user experience based on usability. The models indicate the key factors that should be respected by the company. Moreover, we also discovered that the respect and the implementation of these techniques will lead to trust building and consequently user satisfaction on the e-commerce site. The recommendations issued by this thesis bring to both the company and the academic literature a key reference. This study offers the managers of Etilux an opportunityus to strengthen their online presence and drive positive results throughout guidelines identified in our qualitative research.