Designing for User and Brand Experience: Implementing Parallax Scrolling in Online Shops to Explicitly and Implicitly Affect UX, Brand Sustainability and Behavioral Intentions: An Abstract

The number of internet users has grown at remarkable rates worldwide in recent decades, with developed countries reaching 80.9% internet users across the population in 2018 (ITU, 2018). Additionally, retail e-commerce sales worldwide reached 2.304 billion US dollars in 2017 and are forecasted to increase to 4.878 billion by 2021 (eMarketer, 2018). Despite the arising opportunities for companies to sell their products online (Siok, 2018), marketers are challenged to attract customers and convert shoppers into paying customers at the same time (Hassan, 2017). With competitors being just a click away (Bilgihan, 2016), creating a user experience (UX) that fulfills pragmatic qualities in terms of, e.g., efficiency and perspicuity while emphasizing the users’ subjective reactions and emotional aspects, such as through uniqueness and stimulation, is required (Rauschenberger et al., 2013; Wang et al., 2015). Despite the technicalities of the online shop, the online presence of a brand needs to attract consumers’ attention and communicate and transmit the values and virtues of a brand and its products. In this context, storytelling has gained particular importance as an efficient means of brand communication (Snow, 2014; Da Costa, 2019). Rarely, however, do research and practice address the question of which method can be used to implement storytelling efficiently in an online context. As online shoppers demand unique designs and experiences, parallax can be a solution that implements interactive and three-dimensional effects and creates a depth of images for users (Wang & Shyu, 2014). It is precisely this gap, the targeted design and implementation of storytelling in online shops that is addressed in this paper by examining in detail how the use of storytelling with parallax technology can influence the user experience (UX) in online shops as well as brand- and behavior-relevant variables. Since consumers’ reactions to stimuli underlie explicit reflective and automatic implicit processes (Evans and Stanovich, 2013), a combined measurement approach implements methods of consumer neuroscience that examine both implicit and explicit information processing to holistically assess consumers’ UX and brand associations evoked by storytelling techniques.