Doctoral thesis of Philosophy: Contributing factors to the user experience of e-commerce websites: usability, user expectations and the designer perspective

This research investigates the interactive effects of usability, the designer perspective and user expectations on the user experience (UX) of e-commerce websites. It incorporates the theoretical underpinnings of Norman’s (1988) seminal research specifically, Mental Models and Nielsen’s User Categories (1993) to explore the different mental models, domain and technology expertise of two distinct groups – users and designers – in the interaction with a selected system image, that of the e-commerce website. In this study, the system image is representative of an e-commerce website user experience.