Profiling of Website Visitors Based on Dimensions of User Experience

Abstract

Profiling website visitors is necessary to better tailor the features that affect the overall user experience and ultimately achieve higher customer satisfaction. Our paper considers the usage of such dimensions of visual impression as Complexity, Aesthetics and Orderliness to identify statistically differing user groups. The analysis is based on the experiment with 70 participants of different demographics and professional occupations who evaluated 497 university websites. The results suggest that the profiling of visitors should be specific to the website goals. For instance Complexity impression was not affected by the gender factor, but business and technical specialists did evaluate it differently. Moreover, the latter groups of specialists also associated higher Complexity with lower Aesthetics, whereas the other groups in the study, including the students, thought otherwise. We also demonstrated that the demarcating age value was 19, after which the visual preferences seemed to change dramatically. The results of our study might be useful for both theoreticians working in human-computer interaction and to practicing website designers and user researchers.