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Owing to high competition in e-commerce, customers may prefer sites that ensure that good user experience (UX) and website aesthetics are one of its qualities. The method of presenting items seems crucial for gaining and maintaining user attention. We conducted a task-based user eye-tracking study with n = 30 participants to examine two variants of an online fashion store: one based on aesthetic rules and one defying them. The following aspects of item presentation were considered: height and width the ratio of product photos, website colors, rounded borders, text visibility, spacing between elements, and smooth animation. We investigated their relationship to user attention by analyzing gaze fixation, tracking user interest, and conducting a supplementary survey. Experimental results showed that owing to following the rules of aesthetics in interface design in the presented fashion shopping scenario, elements such as the recommendation area and product highlights had a significant positive impact on customer attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

E-commerce shop owners often want to attract user attention to a specific product to enhance the chances of sales, to cross-sell, or up-sell. The way of presenting a recommended item is as important as the recommendation algorithms are to gain that attention. In this study, we examined the following types of highlights: background, shadow, animation, and border, as well as the position of the item in a 5 × 2 grid in a furniture online store, and their relationships with user fixations and user interest. We wanted to verify the effects highlighting had on attracting user attention. Various levels of intensity were considered for each highlight: low, medium, and strong. Methods used for data collection were both implicit and explicit: eye tracking, tracking cart's contents, and a supplementary survey. Experimental results showed that a low-intensity background highlight should be the first-choice solution to best attract user attention in the presented shopping scenario, resulting in the best fixation times and most users' selections. However, in the case of the highest-intensity animations, highlighting seemed to have negative effects; despite successful attempts to attract eyesight and a long fixation time, users did not add the highlighted products to cart. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how a study group consisting of 85 participants interact with selected online stores and how the interactions correlate with interest in products for each store. This work uses a quantitative research methodology involving a dedicated tool for implicit monitoring of human-website interaction, instrumented for selected stores and registering product interest for the benefit of recommender systems. One of the findings was that to predict product interest it seems a good idea to start with monitoring scrolling activities, mouse usage and time spent on a website and its sections. Rich product information played a crucial role in shaping user interest. For all stores in the study, a misclassification rate of 28.7% was achieved in a CART model, while modeling for particular stores, it varied from 39.3% to 24.8%, and we feel that it reflected different page layouts in stores. Models built to represent individual behavior patterns of most active study participants varied in terms of misclassification rates from 17% to 26%, and the analysis suggested that individual preference modeling could be considered for recommender systems, in particular for key customers or customer groups. The study leads to insights into online store user behavior and product interest prediction, and as a result to possible implications for recommender systems design, including ergonomics optimization and interaction personalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The spectacular growth of the Internet has become an opportunity for commercial development. Unceasing rivalry between web shops to increase sales and market share causes that that they continually seek new ways of gaining competitive advantage. One of them is multimedia optimisation of web sites, which plays an important role in building the image of the web shop as was found in the study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]