Towards a Human-Centered E-Commerce Personalization Framework

This paper presents a personalization framework, namely PersonaWeb that adapts the visual and interaction design of E-Commerce Web environments based on human cognitive differences. In particular, it describes a user model formalization that incorporates a set of human cognitive factors (i.e., cognitive styles and working memory capacity) and an adaptation engine that personalizes the visual and interaction design attributes of E-Commerce product views. The proposed framework has been applied in a real-life E-Commerce Web-site and two subsequent user studies were conducted in which 135 users interacted with the personalized and the original (non-personalized) version of the same Web environment. Results indicate the added value of personalizing content and functionality of E-Commerce product views in terms of users' task completion performance.