Imagine that you work in the IT department of a large online

Imagine that you work in the IT department of a large online retailer. The company management is interested in gaining an understanding of how users experience various web pages. Describe five variables that you believe would be useful to know for each web page that a single customer visited. In your answer, include two categorical, two quantitative, and one label variable. For the categorical variables, provide the possible values (i.e., the categories). For the quantitative variables, state the unit of measure (e.g., minutes, days, count, percentage of, etc.). Briefly provide the rationale for your choice in variables.

Solution

Five variables which are useful are

Categorical Variable:

Variable Name Description Categories

1) Knowledge How did you know about this webpage? a) Search engine(google,yahoo,bing etc)

b)Social media(facebook,whatsapp,etc)

c) Print media(newspapers,magazin,etc)

d) Others

2) Content Do you think that the webpage had enough a) Yes

content similar or more than a physical store b) No

c) Equally comparable

Quantitative variable:

  Variable Name Description Unit

1) Frequency How many times in a month do you visit this webpage Number

2) Duration On an average, how many minutes do you spend each time   

you make a purchase Minutes

Label Variable:

Gender: Male/Female/Other

Justification of variables chosen:

The variables have been chosen so that a custemor\'s experience is mapped in an efficient manner by asking the least number of questions.The label variable(gender) has been so chosen that an important perspective of the customer\'s buying experience is noted without asking them any intimate details.This might help us to understand whether different genders have different shopping,browsing and visiting patterns.

The categorical variable,content has been chosen so that the company can know whether the webpage has enough items within it to satisfy customer’s meeds when taken in comparison to a physical store. The other categorical variable, knowledge is used to understand the source of the visit for any customer. If we understand these patterns well, and we find out that any one website is preferred more then more advertising revenue can be spent there.

The quantitative variable, frequency is asked to know the number of times any customer visits the webpage. This helps us in understanding whether we have more repeat customers or unique ones. Using this information we can spend more money on either customer service for repeat customers and increased advertisement for reaching customers.

The last quantitative variable, duration is asked to understand the average time they spend before buying any product. If they spend a lot of time in doing so, then either they are very choosy (statistically rare) or that the product catalogue is not exhaustive enough. Then we can taken appropriate measures to address them.