Assessment of Persuasive Design Principles in E-Commerce Applications Based on Users’ Reviews

Abstract

Different e-commerce applications aim to utilize different techniques and methods to enhance their usability and persuasive design experience. Persuasive design persuades users to use an application. Users also review the applications they use and provide comments based on their experiences. Therefore, this study aims to examine that to what extent the principles of the persuasive systems design (PSD) model have been implemented in a number of e-commerce applications in Saudi Arabia based on user reviews. Users’ reviews have been extracted using Appbot tool. Filtering and categorizing the collected users’ reviews took place before analyzing the data. The filtering and categorization were based on PSD model. The results demonstrate which principles of the PSD model are highly used in the selected applications based on users’ reviews. Tailoring, tunneling, and reductions principles have been reported to be positively utilized and implemented by the selected applications. Moreover, the findings report different users’ reviews on rewards and social supports principles.