Improving the interface of an e-commerce website by applying universal design principles

Abstract

This paper presents an analysis of two websites in terms of accessibility and usability. An authorial e-commerce website with improvements for people with disabilities was implemented. The website was compared with a popular commercial service. The study was conducted on a group of students and used the eye tracking method, a questionnaire developed for the purpose of the study and the LUT checklist. Additionally, an accessibility study was performed using the WAVE web accessibility evaluation tool. In the eye tracking study five measures were selected to evaluate the websites: the task completion time, the mean fixation time, the mean number of fixations, the mean saccade duration, and the mean number of saccades. On the basis of the obtained results and after their initial processing basic statistics and box plots were created to facilitate interpretation of the results.