Towards Immersive Inclusivity for C2C: How Immersive Multimodal Interactions Can Make Online Customer-to-Customer Shopping More Inclusive
Bektur Ryskeldiev, Mariko Kobayashi, Kentaro Teramoto, Koki Kusano · 2023
Online shopping is becoming ubiquitous in everyday life, with shopping experiences primarily delivered through either websites or specialized applications. This format may create inclusivity problems for users with different needs, as not all websites or applications are optimized for accessibility or have multiple alternative forms of interaction with the content. This can be especially challenging in customer-to-customer (C2C) platforms. While in online shopping a single platform can make merchants provide a unified display for description, standardized packaging, and ensure the item quality, in C2C platforms this responsibility falls mostly on users, thus creating a need for a more versatile way of processing, display, and interaction with C2C content. We are interested in how this issue can be alleviated through addition of online assistants that support immersive and multimodal forms of interactions. To gain a better understanding of the problem and needs of users, we have built a prototype application that uses a voice-activated assistant for item search and purchase and evaluated it in a pilot study. The findings suggest that participants value efficiency in C2C shopping and find current platforms problematic, while showing interest in voice search, immersive and multimodal interfaces to improve the overall shopping experience, despite some issues with voice recognition and response time.