Optimizing the digital customer journey—Improving user experience by exploiting emotions, personas and situations for individualized user interface adaptations

This paper discusses a novel approach for exploiting emotions and situation‐aware software adaptation methods for individualizing some of the touch points of the digital customer journey and thereby optimizing customer experience and effectiveness of e‐commerce applications. Our approach uses emotion recognition, eye‐tracking, and other individual tracking methods as well as customer personas for adapting interactive web applications by accessing a flexible adaptation framework at runtime. The framework allows for individualization at runtime by applying situation‐aware adaptations. Two experimental customer studies were carried out in the e‐commerce domain in order to provide a basis for exploitable emotion‐ and persona‐related situational changes. The results of the studies were used to demonstrate the potential of our situation analytic adaptation approach with examples from a commercial beauty‐products e‐business portal.