User Loyalty Articles

The design of the environment for this study, the website, uses an iterative design process (Gould et al.1985) to design, test and redesign (Lounday 1998). Iterative design is an established design process with user involvement and is successfully used in software design (Good 1985; Savage 1996). Differing from the proposed use of an Understand-Deliver-Measure cycle for designing personalisation systems (Adomavicius et al. 2003), in this research a design, test cycle is used. It is used for the whole process of creating a website that provides a valuable user experience and for the test and measurement of the impact of personalisation features on user loyalty. During the five month of this research, the cycle is executed twice. Schubert et al. (2000) also recommends the collection of feedback because it is an important aspect for the creation and maintenance of an online community.

The first cycle started with literature review, competitor analysis, technology, design and content research to create an understanding of the aspects which are valuable for the user-experience of the target audience. A website based on the findings of the first phase was designed and put online. User feedback about the website was gathered through feedback from forums and polls to get a systematic overview of users’ opinions (Isaacs, 2002, p 263).

In the second cycle a new version of the website, with changes according to earlier findings and personalisation features implemented, was introduced. The evaluation of the personalisation features should be based on A/B testing; therefore every second member of the site was browsing the site with personalisation features enabled. The decision for that derived from the successful use in online businesses such as Amazon (Kohavi 2004) or Google (Sinha 2005) to determine what changes may benefit the user experience.

To measure the user experience one has to take a look at the different approaches that exist. Novak et al. (2000) suggests that data of duration time and browsing depth is ‘highly positively correlated with a compelling online customer experience’.

In other studies measures from the industry are used (Kotha et al. 2001), or own measures are constructed (Toms et al. 2004). Toms et al. (2004) says that ‘ assessing user experience is popularly equated with usability’. Dillon et al. (2001) and Kankainen (2002) argue that usability research is not enough to measure the user experience. Studies showed that ‘ease of use is insufficient to predict the intention to use’ (Dillon, 2001). In this research qualitative and quantitative data from users were evaluated. While feedback from forums and polls delivered the direction for the development of the site, a first survey assessed the user needs and their experience with the site.

Three weeks after the first, a second survey with focus on personalisation, certain elements of the user experience and loyalty, was conducted. In the last step the data was evaluated and compared with the data of the user profiles, because what users say about their behaviour and how they behave is often very different. (Dutka et al.1997; Graesser et al. 2002; Ellis et al. 2001).

Figure 2: Iterative Design Process