Effectiveness is a main concern in usability measurement today. Most studies combine different usability metrics involving efficiency, effectiveness, and subjective satisfaction to obtain quantitative evidence of the user’s tasks and her/his subjective satisfaction in order to improve designs in formative and summative evaluations, having usability indicators for measuring user experience in web applications embedding multimedia technology.

The authors of this paper report on a particular software application. Namely, business-to-customer (B2C) e-commerce involves e-commerce applications and many interacting users. This unequivocally requests implicit effectiveness to determine user “experience that influences the customers’ perceptions of value and service quality, which consequently affects customer loyalty and retention.”

The main contribution of this paper is presenting user experience as a function of information size and multimedia type to present the information in the cited applications. To do so, authors analyze the user’s overall perception of service quality, extending “beyond user-perceived media quality to include measures such as usability and user satisfaction.” Though experimental research, this work analyzes quality in terms of information perception and multimedia preference (text, audio, image, or video), presenting a family of equations to estimate the distribution of the information according to the four types of multimedia considered, in order to maximize the overall opinion scores of several users, and being of interest to optimize the use of multimedia types in the design of web applications.