User Loyalty Articles

A successful user experience combines several types of experience (Schmitt, 2004). Expectations play an important role in user experience and also for user satisfaction. The goal in order to establish loyalty must be that the value of the user experience exceeds the user’s expectations. The result is a positive experience and satisfaction. Personalisation can deliver benefits in the form of saved time and effort or personal treatment, but a personalisation system has to utilise the right features and form of presentation to work efficiently and create value for the user.

User experience includes several aspects such as branding, content usability and functionality (Rubinoff 2004) and the multi-layered design process (Olsen 2003) is usually supported by a team of experts (McBride 2004).

Previous research in the field of user experience showed that website navigability and relationship services, such as virtual community building and site personalisation, improve the experience and attract users to visit a website (Kotha et al. 2001). The core of user experience is multifaceted and several models have been developed.

Dillon et al. (2001) proposed that user experience is the sum of action plus result plus emotions. Kankainen (2002) in his model describes user experience as the ‘result of motivated action in a certain context’. The previous experiences influence the present experience and the present experience will shape the expectations for future experience.

According to Wright (2003) an experience consists of four threads.

The compositional thread describes the structure of an experience, the sensual thread is the ‘look and feel’ of the experience, the emotional thread consists of feeling involved and the spatio-temporal thread describes the time and space in which the experience takes place. He concludes that the expectations a user has in the next experience are as important as the environment that is provided for the experience.

Budd et al. (2003) describes the term ‘experience design’ with the goal of creating positive user experiences. He demands that, because user experience can be experience from a variety of experience types, practitioners from the different areas must work together in the future.

Schmitt (2004) describes different types of experiences. The sense experience appeals to the five senses, sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. In the feel experience value is created by creating positive emotions. The think experience creates value by engaging user creatively. The act experience creates value by showing users alternative ways of doing something and the relate experience creates value by giving users a feeling that they belong to a group. Batterbee et al. (2003) names the relate experience ‘co-experience’, which is ‘ the experience that users themselves create together in social interaction’.

Scope of the research

The scope of the research was to measure the impact of dynamic personalisation features on the members’ level of loyalty to the site. Members were chosen because, according to the German “Online-Datenschutz-Prinzipien” (transl: Online-Privacy-Principles) a website provider has to inform a user if identifiable data about them is collected. This is done in the disclaimer of the site when a member registers.

Another aspect was that members were able to use all features of the site and therefore benefited from all personalisation features.

Because this research was based on an emotional definition of customer loyalty, the goal was to fulfil higher-level needs (Chak 2002, p.2). The effect of the personalisation features also benefits from that because higher-level needs are more personal and therefore they have a bigger impact on the user (Kasanoff 2001, pp.113-119).

The hierarchy of needs and the personalisation ladder both derive from Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (Huitt 2004) and can be merged therefore. The result shows that most of the levels of the personalisation ladder are already in the highest level of user needs (fig. 1)(Kasanoff 2001, p.113).

Figure 1. Framework for this study

That is the reason adjustments to the website, that were made during the development process, focussed on creating a desirable, useful, credible and valuable user experience. The aspects of user experience that a website must be usable, accessible and findable were only dealt with to the extent that they fulfil the expectations of the users (Moreville 2004).