A Quantitative Approach in Heuristic Evaluation of E-commerce Websites

This paper presents a pilot study on developing an instrument to predict the quality of e-commerce websites. The 8C model was adopted as the reference model of the heuristic evaluation. Each dimension of the 8C was mapped into a set of quantitative website elements, selected websites were scraped to get the quantitative website elements, and the score of each dimension was calculated. A software was developed in PHP for the experiments. In the training process, 10 experiments were conducted and quantitative analyses were regressively conducted between the experiments. The conversion rate was used to verify the heuristic evaluation of an e-commerce website after each experiment. The results showed that the mapping revisions between the experiments improved the performance of the evaluation instrument, therefore the experiment process and the quantitative mapping revision guideline proposed was on the right track. The software resulted from the experiment 10 can serve as the aimed e-commerce website evaluation instrument. The experiment results and the future work have been discussed.