Abstract
Websites are one of the most frequently used communication environments, and creating sustainable web designs should be an objective for all companies. Ensuring high usability is proving to be one of the main contributors to sustainable web design, reducing usage time, eliminating frustration and increasing satisfaction and retention. The present paper studies the usability of different website landing pages, seeking to identify the elements, structures and designs that increase usability. The study analyzed the behavior of 22 participants during their interaction with five different landing pages while they performed three tasks on the webpage and freely viewed each page for one minute. The stimuli were represented by five different banking websites, each of them presenting the task content in a different mode (text, image, symbol, graph, etc.).; the data obtained from the eye tracker (fixations location, order and duration, saccades, revisits of the same element, etc.), together with the data from the applied survey lead to interesting conclusions: the top, center and right sides of the webpage attract the most attention; the use of pictures depicting persons increase visibility; the scanpaths follow a vertical and horizontal direction; numerical data should be presented through graphs or tables. Even if a user's past experience influences their experience on a website, we show that the design of the webpage itself has a greater influence on webpage usability.
Highlights
Each participant in the study completed a set of questions, offering more details about their general experience with the online environment, as well as specific opinions about each studied website and the tasks performed there. This setup of the study allowed the researchers to analyze the subjects’ online behavior so that each of the following research objectives could be fulfilled: (1) Identify elements memorized by the users following the free-viewing of the websites and their correlation with the elements registered by the eye tracker as being viewed; (2) Determining the order in which subjects visualize different bits of information on the landing pages of a website while performing a task; (3) Establishing the relationship between the measured and perceived difficulty for fulfilling a task, in the case of different website structures and designs and (4) Determining the variance (ANOVA) of the measured difficulty of fulfilling a task for different structures and design of the landing page
As the present paper focuses on the study of web design sustainability, usability and user experience (UX), the following section summarizes the results of several research papers that applied neuromarketing techniques—especially eye tracking- to the study of web design
Using the eye tracker software, an areas of interest (AOIs) map was generated so that metrics such as visualization sequence, number of visualizations, or average fixation could be analyzed against the mentioning frequency of the elements memorized by subjects; this data was analyzed for the specific information of each website
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. During a time when a great part of our activity takes place online, ensuring the quality of user-interface interaction becomes vital for keeping consumers satisfied. It has been shown that consumers often become loyal to certain brands, because of the intrinsic qualities of their product or service and thanks to the unique and pleasant interaction and communication choices that the company makes. When designing a website, its impact on the consumer should not be the only concern; but consideration should be given to its impact on the environment
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