Ghandour, Rajab (2018) Multimodal social media product reviews and ratings in e-commerce: an empirical approach. Doctoral thesis, University of West London.

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Abstract

Since the booming of the internet and the “.com” (e-commerce) in the 1990’s, everything has changed. This improvement created different areas for researchers to investigate and examine, especially in the fields of human computer interaction and social media. This technological revolution has dramatically changed the way we interact with computers, buy, communicate and share information. This thesis investigates multimodal presentations of social media review and rating messages within an e-commerce interface. Multimodality refers to the communication pattern that goes beyond text to include images, audio and media. Multimodality provides a new way of communication, as images, for example, can deliver an additional information which might be difficult or impossible to communicate using text only. Social media can be defined as a two-way interaction using the internet as the communication medium.The overall hypothesis is that the use of multimodal metaphors (sound and avatars) to present social media product r views will improve the usability of the ecommerce interface and increase the user understanding, reduce the time needed to make a decision when compared to non-multimodal presentations. E-commerce usability refers to the presentation, accessibility and clarity of information. An experimental e-commerce platform was developed to investigate the particular interactive circumstances that multimodal metaphors may benefit the social media communication of reviews of products to users. The first experiment using three conditions (text with emoji’s, earcons and facially expressive avatars) measured the user comprehension, understanding information, user satisfaction with the way in which information was communicated and social media preference in e-commerce. The second experiment investigated the time taken by users to understand information, understanding information correctly, user satisfaction and user enjoyment using three conditions (emoji’s, facially expressive avatar and animation clips) in ecommerce platform. The results of the first set experiments of the showed that the text with emoji’s and the use of facially expressive avatar conditions had improved the users’ performance through understanding information effectively and making decisions quicker compared to the earcons condition. In the second experiment, the results showed that the users performed better (understanding information, understating information faster) using the emoji’s and the facially expressive avatar presentations compared to the use of the animation clip condition. A set of empirically derived guidelines to implement these metaphors to communicate social media product reviews in e-commerce interface have been presented.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Subjects:	Business and finance > Business and management
Depositing User:	Users 3908 not found.
Date Deposited:	21 Mar 2018 09:08
Last Modified:	28 Aug 2021 07:25
URI:	https://repository.uwl.ac.uk/id/eprint/4755

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