An Individual Differences Approach in Adaptive Waving of User Checkout Process in Retail eCommerce

Abstract

Developing a usable checkout process is pivotal for e-business success. However, recent research has shown that users frequently abandon their shopping carts and lacking a clear direction through the process. In this context, aiming to improve the usability and overall user experience of checkout processes in ecommerce Web-sites, this paper reports on a study, primarily inspired by concepts driven from theories of individual differences in cognitive processing, and considers content presentation and navigability as a measure of checkout usability and task quality. Concurrent think-aloud, short interviews and questionnaires were conducted with a convenient sample of 15 users to understand the preference of a particular type of checkout process, and users’ task completion time while interacting with ecommerce Web-sites for a set of different checkout scenarios. Preliminary results revealed that cognitive styles have an effect on users’ task completion and checkout process preference.