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

Intelligent Energy Optimization for User Intelligible Goals in Smart Home Environments

Intelligent management of energy consumption is one of the key issues for future energy distribution systems, smart buildings, and consumer appliances. The problem can be tackled both from the point of view of the utility provider, with the intelligence embedded in the smart grid, or from the point of view of the consumer, thanks to suitable local energy management systems (EMS). Conserving energy, however, should respect the user requirements regarding the desired state of the environment, therefore an EMS should constantly and intelligently find the balance between user requirements and energy saving. The paper proposes a solution to this problem, based on explicit high-level modeling of user intentions and automatic control of device states through the solution and optimization of a constrained Boolean satisfiability problem. The proposed approach has been integrated into a smart environment framework, and promising preliminary results are reporte

Modelling Requirements for Content Recommendation Systems

This paper addresses the modelling of requirements for a content Recommendation System (RS) for Online Social Networks (OSNs). On OSNs, a user switches roles constantly between content generator and content receiver. The goals and softgoals are different when the user is generating a post, as opposed as replying to a post. In other words, the user is generating instances of different entities, depending on the role she has: a generator generates instances of a "post", while the receiver generates instances of a "reply". Therefore, we believe that when addressing Requirements Engineering (RE) for RS, it is necessary to distinguish these roles clearly. We aim to model an essential dynamic on OSN, namely that when a user creates (posts) content, other users can ignore that content, or themselves start generating new content in reply, or react to the initial posting. This dynamic is key to designing OSNs, because it influences how active users are, and how attractive the OSN is for existing, and to new users. We apply a well-known Goal Oriented RE (GORE) technique, namely i-star, and show that this language fails to capture this dynamic, and thus cannot be used alone to model the problem domain. Hence, in order to represent this dynamic, its relationships to other OSNs' requirements, and to capture all relevant information, we suggest using another modelling language, namely Petri Nets, on top of i-star for the modelling of the problem domain. We use Petri Nets because it is a tool that is used to simulate the dynamic and concurrent activities of a system and can be used by both practitioners and theoreticians.Comment: 28 pages, 7 figure

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

Benefits and challenges of applying Semantic Web Services in the e-Government domain

Joining up services in e-Government usually implies governmental agencies acting in concert without a central control regime. This requires the sharing of scattered and heterogeneous data. Semantic Web Service (SWS) technology can help to integrate, mediate and reason between these datasets. However, since few real-world applications have been developed, it is still unclear which are the actual benefits and issues of adopting such a technology in the e-Government domain. In this paper, we contribute to raising awareness of the potential benefits in the e-Government community by analyzing motivations, requirements, and expected results, before proposing a reusable SWS-based framework. We demonstrate the application of this framework by a compelling use case: a GIS-based emergency planning system. We illustrate the obtained benefits and the key challenges which remain to be addressed

The Role of Heuristics in Information Security Decision Making

Inadvertent human errors (e.g., clicking on phishing emails or falling for a spoofed website) have been the primary cause of security breaches in recent years. To understand the root cause of these errors and examine practical solutions for users to overcome them, we applied the theory of bounded rationality and explored the role of heuristics (i.e., short mental processes) in security decision making. Interviews with 27 participants revealed that users rely on various heuristics to simplify their decision making in the information security context. Specifically, users rely on experts’ comments (i.e., expertise heuristic), information at hand, such as recent events (i.e., availability heuristic), and security-representative visual cues (i.e., representativeness heuristic). Findings also showed the use of other heuristics, including affect, brand, and anchoring, to a lesser degree. The results have practical and theoretical significance. In particular, they extend the literature by integrating bounded rationality concepts and elaborating “how” users simplify their security decision making by relying on cognitive heuristics

Useful shortcuts: Using design heuristics for consent and permission in smart home devices

Prior research in smart home privacy highlights significant issues with how users understand, permit, and consent to data use. Some of the underlying issues point to unclear data protection regulations, lack of design principles, and dark patterns. In this paper, we explore heuristics (also called “mental shortcuts” or “rules of thumb”) as a means to address security and privacy design challenges in smart homes. First, we systematically analyze an existing body of data on smart homes to derive a set of heuristics for the design of consent and permission. Second, we apply these heuristics in four participatory co-design workshops (n = 14) and report on their use. Third, we analyze the use of the heuristics through thematic analysis highlighting heuristic application, purpose, and effectiveness in successful and unsuccessful design outcomes. We conclude with a discussion of the wider challenges, opportunities, and future work for improving design practices for consent in smart homes