Integration of Eye-Tracking Based Studies into e-Commerce Websites Evaluation Process with eQual and TOPSIS Methods

The evaluation of the e-commerce websites’ quality, usability and user experience is an important research task. Various survey-based evaluation methods are available, eQual being one of them. However, these methods are not free of disadvantages. In this paper, a novel approach is presented, where a single usability evaluation model is created on the basis of the eQual survey criteria and the perceptual evaluation data from eye tracking devices, thus extending the statistical survey model with objective gaze measurements and Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) methodology foundations. The combined data is processed with the crisp and fuzzy variants of the TOPSIS method to evaluate the websites. An empirical verification is performed and the results are presented. The results showed the benefits of the author’s proposed approach as well as the wide possibilities of interpretation of the obtained solutions.