Improving the Usability of E-Commerce Applications using Business Processes

  • Authors:
  • Ying Zou;Qi Zhang;Xulin Zhao

  • Affiliations:
  • IEEE Computer Society;-;-

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

E-commerce applications automate many daily business activities. Users interact with e-commerce applications throughmenu-driven User Interface (UI) components, such as toolbars, dialogs and windows. However, the tremendous number offunctionality may overwhelm the users. Users struggle to locate the appropriate UI components to accomplish the tasks required bybusiness processes. In this paper, we enhance e-commerce applications by improving their usability using the knowledgeembedded in business process definitions. Our improved application provides contextual information to fulfill each business task.The improved application guides users through the various tasks in a step-by-step fashion. Through a controlled experiment, wedemonstrate that our improved application offers a better usability experience for novice users by giving them more guidance andreducing the time needed to locate the next UI component in a complex UI.