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© 2020, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.Everyone eats. It is a fundamental act to human existence. On the other hand, in today’s society, achieving healthy food products is challenging. Proliferation of industrialized agriculture has created public health concerns due to rise of obesity and diet-related disease around the world. People who are aware of the effects of food choices on human body, have been trying to become food literate. In other words, they have been trying pursuing to obtain necessary knowledge to select, prepare and consume healthy food. Yet, information pollution and lack of education engenders gastro-anxiety which is a term to describe the suspicion about foodways. In this context, an application called Kliktag introduces itself as “A Healthy Food Advisory.” The application seems to alleviate the gastro-anxiety of its users. Due to this impression, this study aims to analyze the competency of this application to empower the level of food literacy among users. It also aims to investigate the user experience of Kliktag through an analysis framework based on parameters such as Onboarding, Search Experience (Findability), Visual Hierarchy, Visibility, Data Visualization, User Collaboration and Editorial Tone. It was also analyzed how user behaviors were changed related to evolving food literacy. To achieve this aim, a multi-method user research based on two separate phases was conducted. The study firstly focused on the momentary first-time user experience through a usability test while the second phase was based on a 10 day-diary study that aims to understand the evolving cumulative user experience on the mobile app. According to the findings, users could tolerate the detrimental effects of user experience issues and maintain a particular level of food literacy in short term.

User experience (UX) research has attracted increasing attention especially in the last decade as the demand for online shopping has increased by 30.7% from 2014 to 2015 in Turkey. The traditional methods including surveys/questionnaires, think-aloud procedures, and in-depth interviews have contributed greatly for understanding the problems during the use of shopping internet sites. On the other hand, the use of neuroscientific methods, such as biometrics and neurometrics, has also grabbed attention with the exciting idea of providing an objective means of understanding cognitive and affective processes during the user experience during online shopping. Despite significant/strong limitations, many researchers are interested in exploring actively its potential use in the field.

Understanding user experience (UX) during e-commerce has been a relatively important research area especially in the last decade. The use of conventional methods in UX such as task-observation, in-depth interviews and questionnaires has already contributed for the measurement of the efficiency and effectiveness. This empirical study has aimed to make use of both conventional and neuroscientific methods simultaneously to provide a richer analysis framework for understanding the product search experience of the first-time buyers. The current work provides insights for the results from the combined use of conventional and neuroscientific-biometric methods in a UX study. Although this has been an exploratory study within a limited literature, the obtained results indicate a potential use of these methods for UX research, which may contribute to improve the relevant experience in various digital platforms.

Social media has a significant impact in our daily social lives, which challenges the traditional face-to-face interaction and/or other conventional media. Most of the social media platforms provide unique and effective web sites that enable the users to connect and interact with one another yet they also update their sites with Web 2.0 improvements and innovative ways of interaction. Twitter and Facebook have launched their own applications that became really popular among users. However, there are also third-party applications, which enable the use of diverse social networking sites through one platform. These platforms are within the reach of everyone and can be accessed directly from desktop without any browser needed. This research focuses on the usability of these third-party management applications. In this context, it will explore whether the desktop versions (third-party software) of those platforms enhance the interaction capabilities and improve user experience. In this regard the focus will be on an application that enables the use of multiple social media sites simultaneously through a single graphical user interface, ‘Yoono’. The user interaction with multiple accounts and social media services at the same time presents the ability to show the information in one screen rather than having separate tabs like has been done in typical browser view. Also it might be possible to have an estimate about if the user prefers to have separate tabs or just one tab to show all of the information regarding the social media that he/she is using. In order to understand this, a qualitative usability test, based on multi-method approach, was carried out with a sample of 8 participants who were experienced mobile social network site (SNS) users. Tests were conducted on a desktop computer with Yoono. After a background questionnaire, the participants were observed during the task executions and additional data was collected through eye-tracking. After the session, participants were asked to fill out a post-test form while having a small debriefing interview to gain a detailed insight into their experience. Findings support the notion that the usability problems might shroud the new and innovative capabilities of Yoono and prevents it to become an application that users would chose to use instead of browser interaction and needs further development in order to be an alternative to browsing.

One of the major issues in banking is "consumer loan". Most of the banks allow customers to apply for a "personal" or "generic" loan online. This procedure requires filling out forms with some "familiar data" and calculating the rates and fees for the total cost. Although online banking is a supported feature of banking in general, every system offers a different path for the same experience. This pilot study, which is the first step of a long-term study, focuses on three different bank web sites in Turkey and investigates the "find and search" strategies that users employ in order to apply for a specific amount of loan. For this purpose a qualitative usability test, based on a multi-method approach, was carried out with a sample of 11 Turkish senior year university students who were experienced Internet users and potential new customers. The participants were observed during the task executions and additional data was collected by the "think aloud" procedure, eye-tracking and video recording of the participants. Complementary data on user experience was collected by a final debriefing interview. The findings revealed significant usability problems caused specifically by the user interface features and information architecture of each system and enable to propose guidelines to improve user experience in form design and/or check-out process.

There's a growing interest towards mobile commerce in recent years. This pilot study, which is the first step of an extensive long-term research, investigated mobile usability in mobile "private shopping" applications. Focusing on three different private shopping applications / mobile sites in Turkey, a qualitative mobile usability test, based on a multi-method approach, was carried out with a sample of 11 Turkish senior year university students, who were experienced mobile Internet users and potential customers of private shopping platforms. The participants were observed during the task executions and additional data was collected by the "think aloud" procedure, eye-tracking and video recording of the participants. A short debriefing interview was also made to gain a detailed insight into the user experience. The findings revealed significant mobile usability problems and enabled to propose guidelines to improve user experience in mobile private shopping.

This study evaluated the hypothesis that design aspects of the user interface of the applications and the capabilities and constraints of different mobile devices could affect mobile user experience in social network sites (SNS). For this purpose a qualitative mobile usability test, based on a multi-method approach, was carried out with a sample of 25 Turkish university students who were experienced mobile SNS users. The tests were conducted with two different smartphones: Iphone and Blackberry. The participants were observed during the task executions and additional data was collected by the "think aloud" procedure, eye-tracking and video recording of the participants. A short debriefing interview was also made to gain a detailed insight into the user experience. The findings revealed significant mobile usability problems caused specifically by the user interface features of the applications and limitations of each device and enable to propose guidelines to improve user experience in mobile SNS.