Abstract:

The majority of web businesses do not provide good customer experience: they are unusable and/or do not meet the customers' expectations and preferences. One reason for this state is that good websites rely on both good marketing and software development and usability. Unfortunately, these two disciplines are largely ignorant of each other, with different traditions as well as goals and metrics for success. Marketers rely on the metric they are most familiar with - volume. On the web, this means the number of visitors on the site and how long they stayed. However, both disciplines are critical components for building a web business that makes customers happy and drives loyalty. More sophisticated metrics and research methods are needed to better understand how customers experience the site, incorporating both usability issues and marketing issues. This paper describes the state of customer experience on the web, discusses various methods for understanding customer experience on a website, and argues for a new multi-method approach that incorporates the critical elements of several different methods.