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

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

An analysis of a Heavy Gluino LSP at CDF : The Heavy Gluino Window

In this paper we consider a heavy gluino to be the lightest supersymmetric particle [LSP]. We investigate the limits on the mass of a heavy gluino LSP, using the searches for excess events in the jets plus missing momentum channel in Run I. The neutral and charged R-hadrons, containing a heavy gluino LSP, have distinct signatures at the Fermilab Tevatron. The range of excluded gluino masses depends on whether the R-hadron is charged or neutral and the amount of energy deposited in the hadronic calorimeter. The latter depends on the energy loss per collision in the calorimeter and the number of collisions; where both quantities require a model for R-hadron- Nucleon scattering. We show how the excluded range of gluino mass depends on these parameters. We find that gluinos with mass in the range between $\sim 35$ GeV and $\sim 115$ GeV are excluded by CDF Run I data. Combined with previous results of Baer et al., which use LEP data to exclude the range 3 - 22$\sim$25 GeV, our result demonstrates that an allowed window for a heavy gluino with mass between 25 and 35 GeV is quite robust. Finally we discuss the relevant differences of our analysis of Tevatron data to that of Baer et al.Comment: 36 pages, 11 figures, added an acknowledgemen

Social Navigation of Food Recipes

The term Social Navigation captures every-day behaviour used to find information, people, and places – namely through watching, following, and talking to people. We discuss how to design information spaces to allow for social navigation. We applied our ideas in a recipe recommendation system. In a follow-up user study, subjects state that social navigation adds value to the service: it provides for social affordance, and it helps turning a space into a social place. The study also reveals some unresolved design issues, such as the snowball effect where more and more users follow each other down the wrong path, and privacy issues