The assessment of usability of electronic shopping: A heuristic evaluation

Today there are thousands of electronic shops accessible via the Web. Some provide user-friendly features whilst others seem not to consider usability factors at all. Yet, it is critical that the electronic shopping interface is user-friendly so as to help users to obtain their desired results. This study applied heuristic evaluation to examine the usability of current electronic shopping. In particular, it focused on four UK-based supermarkets offering electronic services: including ASDA, Iceland, Sainsbury, and Tesco. The evaluation consists of two stages: a free-flow inspection and a task-based inspection. The results indicate that the most significant and common usability problems have been found to lie within the areas of ‘User Control and Freedom’ and ‘Help and Documentation’. The findings of this study are applied to develop a set of usability guidelines to support the future design of effective interfaces for electronic shopping

Integrating customer relationship management strategies in (B2C) e-commerce environments

Creating value and generating a total customer experience(TCE ) is important for E -Commerce in order to attract customers. However, with increasing competition in the marketplace, it is becoming increasingly difficult to retain customers. E-Commerce, therefore, should focus on continuously providing value to the customers to build long-term relationships and reduce customer defections. We have evaluated five E -Banking sites from the UK finance industry and have shown that an organisation whose Web site is usable in HCI terms (that satisfies the Web Design heuristics / E -Commerce guidelines) might not always generate a TCE . It is important that along with usability heuristics, customer relationship management (CRM) strategies are integrated into the design of E-Commerce sites. In this paper, we have applied the service quality (SERVQUAL ) framework from the relationship marketing literature for deriving customer relationship enhancing heuristics which can be integrated into the design of E -Commerce environments

The display of electronic commerce within virtual environments

In today’s competitive business environment, the majority of companies are expected to be represented on the Internet in the form of an electronic commerce site. In an effort to keep up with current business trends, certain aspects of interface design such as those related to navigation and perception may be overlooked. For instance, the manner in which a visitor to the site might perceive the information displayed or the ease with which they navigate through the site may not be taken into consideration. This paper reports on the evaluation of the electronic commerce sites of three different companies, focusing specifically on the human factors issues such as perception and navigation. Heuristic evaluation, the most popular method for investigating user interface design, is the technique employed to assess each of these sites. In light of the results from the analysis of the evaluation data, virtual environments are suggested as a way of improving the navigation and perception display constraints

Critical Success Factors for Positive User Experience in Hotel Websites: Applying Herzberg's Two Factor Theory for User Experience Modeling

This research presents the development of a critical success factor matrix for increasing positive user experience of hotel websites based upon user ratings. Firstly, a number of critical success factors for web usability have been identified through the initial literature review. Secondly, hotel websites were surveyed in terms of critical success factors identified through the literature review. Thirdly, Herzberg's motivation theory has been applied to the user rating and the critical success factors were categorized into two areas. Finally, the critical success factor matrix has been developed using the two main sets of data.Comment: Journal articl

From usability to secure computing and back again

Secure multi-party computation (MPC) allows multiple parties to jointly compute the output of a function while preserving the privacy of any individual party’s inputs to that function. As MPC protocols transition from research prototypes to realworld applications, the usability of MPC-enabled applications is increasingly critical to their successful deployment and widespread adoption. Our Web-MPC platform, designed with a focus on usability, has been deployed for privacy-preserving data aggregation initiatives with the City of Boston and the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce. After building and deploying an initial version of the platform, we conducted a heuristic evaluation to identify usability improvements and implemented corresponding application enhancements. However, it is difficult to gauge the effectiveness of these changes within the context of real-world deployments using traditional web analytics tools without compromising the security guarantees of the platform. This work consists of two contributions that address this challenge: (1) the Web-MPC platform has been extended with the capability to collect web analytics using existing MPC protocols, and (2) as a test of this feature and a way to inform future work, this capability has been leveraged to conduct a usability study comparing the two versions ofWeb-MPC. While many efforts have focused on ways to enhance the usability of privacy-preserving technologies, this study serves as a model for using a privacy-preserving data-driven approach to evaluate and enhance the usability of privacy-preserving websites and applications deployed in realworld scenarios. Data collected in this study yields insights into the relationship between usability and security; these can help inform future implementations of MPC solutions.Published versio

Evaluation of a Proposed Set of Usability Heuristics

The innovations proposed by the mobile phone market have grown steadily in recent years, along with the increasing complexity of the hardware, operating systems and applications available in this market. These changes bring new usability-related challenges that need to be considered during the application development process, as new forms of user-application interaction increasingly require behavioral adaptation. In this situation, usability is an important issue, which depends on usability factors such as the User, their characteristics and skills, the Task he intends to achieve and also the Context of Use in which the user and the application are inserted. The components of this set are detailed in a set of heuristics previous proposed that was evaluated through two heuristic evaluations, which allowed to incorporate improvements to the proposal. Furthermore, a set of 13 usability heuristics and 183 sub-heuristics were proposed, which, through heuristic evaluations, better results were evidenced. The proposal makes it easier for experts to find a greater number of usability problems, mostly of greater severity, compared to the proposal of Inostroza et al. As possible future work, further evaluations may be carried out to evaluate the proposal to include more experts in the field, as well as to use the set of heuristics in a larger number of applications of different categories

HCI in e-Government and e-Democracy

This chapter introduces the application of HCI design processes and design principles in e-government and e-democracy. We elaborate on HCI design processes and six HCI design principles in the context of e-government and e-democracy, including citizen-centered design, usability, accessibility, access to information, transaction efficiency, and security and privacy. Then, we present two cases to demonstrate the value of applying the HCI processes and design principles in developing and deploying e-government and e-democracy. Finally, we highlight the challenges faced by e-government and e-democracy as well as the future trends. In conclusion, HCI can help the success of e-government and e-democracy and their future growth

Learner-Centred Design and Evaluation of Web-Based E-Learning Environments

Designing E-learning is a combination of pedagogical design, usability and information architecture. E-learning environments should have intuitive interfaces and clear information design, allowing learners to focus on learning. However, there is often a mismatch between what an on-line educator thinks the learner would learn, and what a learner thinks he will, and then has learned from the course. In addition, there is sometimes a mismatch between how an educator wants to teach and what is represented on the interface by the instructional designers. Such mismatches affect the learner's experience and his motivation for E-learning. In this paper, we will first discuss the source and nature of these mismatches. Next, we will discuss whether usability techniques in the HCI literature are appropriate for evaluating E-learning environments for the learner experience. We will then propose a combination of requirements elicitation and usability techniques for learner-centred design and evaluation of Web-based E-learning environments. The proposed methodology is based on our experience of conducting empirical studies for evaluating user-system interactions in E-Commerce contexts

Layered evaluation of interactive adaptive systems : framework and formative methods

Peer reviewedPostprin

Set of usability heuristics for quality assessment of mobile applications on smartphones

The innovations proposed by the cell phone market have grown steadily in recent years, along with the increasing complexity of the hardware, operating systems, and applications available in this market. These changes bring new challenges related to usability that need to be considered during the development process of these applications since the new forms of user-application interactions increasingly require adapting the behavior of smartphone users. In this situation, usability is an important issue that depends on factors such as the Users, their characteristics and abilities, the Task which the users intend to achieve and also the application usage Context. This work presents a systematic literature review with the objective of identifying the heuristics and usability metrics used in the literature and/or industry. Based on the review results, this work presents another contribution with a proposal of a set of usability heuristics focused in mobile applications on smartphones, considering the User, Task and Context as usability factors and Cognitive Load as an important attribute of usability. The components of this set are detailed in a model intended to be used in empirical validations allowing to dynamically incorporate improvements to the proposal