A Further Investigation of Facial Expressions and Body Gestures as metaphors in E-Commerce

This paper describes two sets of experiments that investigate facial expressions and some issues when using body gestures as communication metaphors in interfaces for e-Business applications. The purpose was to obtain an overall feedback for the use of these types of communication metaphors in e-Commerce. The first set of experiments involved three tasks with a short description of three products with each one presented using either textual or an avatar with facial expressions or body gestures. The second set of experiment involved an extended description of three different products but otherwise the methodology remained the same. The sample was 42 users for both sets of experiments. The results of experiments indicated that there is a prima facie case for the use of these metaphors in e-commerce applications and highlighted several issues for further research. Key-Words: E-Commerce, Multimodal metaphors, Facial expressions, Body language, Avatars, Usability