CIS-447-101

Prof. Murray Turoff

December 1999

Electronic commerce can be defined as a process where two or more parties conduct business transactions via computer and some type of network. Many experts take the definition one step further by not limiting the definition solely to information interchange between two parties, but also including all the steps within a business cycle such as ads, invoices and customer support. It is in the context of this broader definition that the information for this paper is based upon. Although all the hype seems to have started just recently, e-commerce, in the context of information interchange, has been around since the 1970s within large corporations privately networked to share information with business partners, this was labeled (EDI) Electronic Data Interchange. However, the word e-commerce no longer carries that connotation but now refers to online retailing, it was this hype that started around 4 years ago and it was this type of technology that has the IT world up in a! ! ! rms.

Today most companies have some type of presence on the net, be it for informational purposes or to sell goods or services. The results up to date have been mixed so not every business is willing or capable of making a presence on the web. The future of e-commerce is uncertain, some experts predict growth exponentially while others expect the large public companies making their presence and the smaller shops being blown out of the neighborhood. The areas identified as the most likely to grow on the net are in the areas of financial services, travel, entertainment and groceries. Technology advances are helping the creation of storefronts, working to enforce protection against payment fraud, as well as to enhanced information sharing with suppliers and business partners.

Top seven mistakes that sales oriented web sites tend to make according to Michel Fortin are: they target the wrong audience, they take too long to load, they do not compel the visitors to act. Some sites lack scarcity, they lack guarantees and testimonials, they provide poor copy and finally they lack a clear call to action. The one statement that summarizes the efficient strategy well is "be DIRECT!" The users do not want to go around in circles; they need to see what it is in it for them immediately.

Many times it becomes impossible and unrealistic to portray every aspect of a company onto a web site. The designer must focus any ambiguity or confusion must be eliminated even before starting the first draft of any interface design. The step of envisioning is also very important since it is here where the designer identifies what the task at hand is attempting to achieve, and what the end result preliminary looks like. The process includes the process of developing a clear, shared and communicable vision of the product. It is during this process that the usability goals for the interface design should be outlined, compromises should also be identified and the methods to measure success decided upon.

The second step is to analyze; this focuses on gathering user requirements and expectations. Updates are done to the previous step as necessary. The next step is design, this is the step where first a conceptual model is done continuing with a paper model, followed by a visual design and finally a prototype model. Afterwards the designer must take the step to refine, which is used to complete the design for all functionality as well as to conduct usability evaluations, create a style guide and document specifications. The implementation step completes detailed screen designs, creates user assistance materials, supports software development and updates the style guide. The final step is support and it is done to create and monitor feedback mechanism to aid with future designs and possibly refinements to the current design.
Placing a paragraph that delineates the steps does not mean that they are carved in stone and that most designers must follow them to the . t. . This is what researches working for Cognetics believe of the optimal steps to achieve a well-rounded interface. These steps were the focus to create Lucid, a software tool to help during the design of the user interface.

Building blocks can be described as those elements that are essential in creating e-commerce web sites. Realistically the actual creation, implementation, and ongoing maintenance of an e-commerce site can get quite complicated. Breaking the process into essential elements make the process much more feasible, each element can be seen as part of the bigger picture more transparently. Four essential elements to consider for e-commerce are security, the shopping cart, marketing and payment. I found that to identify trends, mistakes and the facets of the interface that work the best method is to show information by example. In this case the examples that were unsuccessful are the ones that best capture this. In the case of the four essentials mentioned above, the shopping cart has become a must have for every e-commerce web site. The shopping cart is synonymous with electronic commerce, users associated it with a storage medium like used in the real world of markets. The a! ! ! ssociation of the shopping cart is lost if name in any other way, the users loose the relationship. Users identify the shopping cart with a place where the choices can be temporarily store before to checking out.

Web users today are very impatient and require immediate recognition and ease of use to spend time viewing a web site. Slow download time, the need to download plug-ins and new interaction techniques do not attract the users on the other hand usually turn them away. This makes the launching of successful web sites the more difficult. Users need to grasp the how to use of a site almost instantly after reaching the information, with such a vast variety of e-commerce sites the leaving of an unsatisfied customer usually means they. ll never return. This is were XML technology fits in like a glove or at least that is what many experts tend to think, the users requirements to have some familiarity leads to the suggestion of standardizing certain facets of the sites online presentation. Although information architecture cannot be standardized from site to site, other facets such as product presentation or ordering methods can. Site customization on a user-by-user basis is! ! ! another criteria that will be crucial for the success of e-commerce. User will require a portal or personalized view into the mass of products offered. User-defined tags in XML could be created to allow for individual user profiles that customize the content of the web catalog. XML could also be used to link user. s profile to the account software to show the users balance or pricing information. Another form of the customer views would involve creating a standard even for businesses with different goods and services. An example of how this would work can be exemplified in the travel industry, a customer profile could be made and shared by the airlines, rental can and Hotel Company. s. The customer would get more seamless and efficient service while the businesses. would have access to more customer data (Bickel, XML in e-commerce)

A custom interface using XML as the markup language will benefit both the vendor and customer. The vision also encompasses vendors having an online catalog of their products. Within these online catalogs vendors can display the products and the information about the product in different manners. A template for product catalogs for multiple vendors of similar products should be created using XML and Document Type Definitions. Presently, these are known as Customer Clearinghouses, the customers would be able to compare products and prices across many vendors with one standardized interface. The vendor benefits by only having to publish their catalog once while reaching more potential buyers. Each business can then build on what was already established without having to reinvent what their competition have already built. Each vendor can keep the product data in a database, when a customer wishes to view an item from the catalog the data is pulled from the database and! ! ! rendered into an XML file, which is viewable through the web. With the presentation being rendered dynamically the content can be updated without affecting the presentation (Glushko, An XML Framework..) These catalogs will also be easier for a machine to read. A parser or search engine will be able to find the desired item faster, the items in a XML file can also be easily sorted making the customer experience a much more speedy one.

XML technology does not only improve the interface design aspect of a web site but also includes enhancements for searching and storing data to make the world of e-commerce a huge interconnected world of products and services which are easily accessed by any user. Presently there. s a gap in the searching aspect of e-commerce, there. s no way of searching for a particular product and getting in return a listing of manufacturers that offer that product or service. The searches right now have to be specific and the user must know store names and the product/service these stores offer to be successful with a search.

Yet another impediment to the ease of searching for products across the Internet is the vocabulary used and coming up with a method of standardizing the words used to describe specific products or services. As explained by Lou Rosenfeld in "Cuisinarts, E-commerce, and& Controlled Vocabularies", controlled vocabularies will eliminate the need for the users to play a guessing game. Using controlled vocabularies can be the difference between productive and effective sites. The definition of controlled vocabularies is a predetermined sets of terms that fit together to describe a specific domain such as kitchen appliances or nuclear engineering. The terms need to be standardized because language is ambiguous, people use different terms to say the same thing, or use the same term that means different things. Predetermining the terms that make up a controlled vocabulary and using those terms to describe your sites content can minimize the negative effects that variant! ! ! s, synonyms, and various other annoyances can have on the effectiveness of your site.

Patience is a rare commodity on the Web; controlled vocabularies make browsing easier by finding the information requested by the user faster. A proposed approach, although more difficult to implement, that would make the controlled vocabularies a total success is the creation of a thesaurus that includes variant, related, broader terms as well as glossary terms. Organizing content around a theme, for example names, subjects, processes, audience types. Although users do not need to see what goes on behind the scenes, improving the searching capabilities will affect retrieval time. Nonetheless, the designer must not forget to give a brief and basic explanation of how the site. s searching system works. The designer must be careful to keep the explanation to a high level and not offer too many technical details that will not seem beneficial to the users understanding.

Identifying how customers make decisions helps in the design of the interface since it allows the designer to best visualize how the information is expected to be found on the screen. E-commerce is not simply concerned with technology but also encompasses results from consumer behavior. The interface must help the user recognize the need for the product or service that is being sold. The designer must also considered what level and amount of information is enough to make the users feel that they can make an inform choice. The consumers usually go through processes of evaluation, which could lead to skeptical ones if not enough relevant information is made available. These evaluations may focus on the weaker aspects of the product or service and not the intended highlighted points. The purchase of a product or service is not the closing piece, but a very crucial one. The users are forced to give private information over the Internet and as such must feel that their! ! ! transactions are secure as well as efficient. The users require the security but don. t want to be bothered with extra long steps of authentication, secure and efficient transactions must be accomplished seamlessly. This also applies for the delivery methods and/or possibly installation steps. The after purchase evaluation is the closing step, a good shopping experience followed by desired quality of the product or service will likely equate to a returning customer. Also designers must keep in mind, that one of the most efficient methods of marketing a product or service is by word of mouth. If the customer leaves satisfy most likely than not they will let their friends know.

E-commerce requires substitution for the traditional trust mechanism of traditional commerce. One of the aspects of this concept is identifying methods of reducing the risk to the users be it by reducing potential liability. Previous users will start to trust the process if past experiences proved trustworthy. The user must also be given the opportunity of tracing the transaction from beginning to end. Formal testing must be done to the system and then certifications must be made available to the users. (Steinauer, Trust and Traceability in Electronic Commerce)

Designers must keep in mind that no web site is ever seen in isolation, users come to your site expecting things to work the same way they are used to. Shopping takes a whole new meaning on the Web, the marketing approach has to be restructured, the face to face contact is lost but the experience must be retained. One of the most important aspects of the interface is to preserve the user satisfaction and making each user feel welcome and as eager as ever to purchase whatever you. re selling. Obviously the audience is much more diverse on the web than during a face to face transaction, as such the interface has to be capable of accommodating this diversity efficiently. A pretty interface does not equal a successful one; there are many other aspects of an e-commerce interface that take preference to the aesthetics of the site.

One of the main factors of a successful web site is that it is easy to use, users don. t react well to feeling overwhelm. In an environment such as e-commerce, the sites may have visitors that range from expert users to first time users. Some suggestions when starting the process of the design is to have the designer think like the user. Make every effort to not allow the user to enter a state of maze, confusion and/or puzzled. The user should be able to identify where he/she came from and the reasoning that brought them to that point, one of the suggestions to achieve this is the concept of navigation bars. The one limitation that is forgotten many times is technology, the designers must remember that, as a general rule they are working with faster machines and connections than the users will have access to. The sites being developed must work well with the faster and slower machines.

Another mark of a successful site is that which can anticipate what the user will do. Intelligent agents can be used to filter floods of information as well as reduce the information complexity. (Hook, Designing and Evaluating Intelligent User Interfaces) This technology can also help provide smart user interfaces that can detect when a user is having difficulty and help the user around the problem. Intelligent agents can be associated with personal assistants in the real world. For this the users must delegate some control to the agent but this will improve the method to reach end results. Some of the attributes of this technology include advances in socially interaction with other agents, mobility where the agent can be transported to another part of the network to achieve a task. The agent can have their own expertise, and they have knowledge utility, which offers intelligent information retrieval and manage! ! ! ment. The web site that always remembers your name and your tastes, known as personalized interfaces are self learning entities that operate in real time. Using the advances of technology to work on improving the services rendered to consumers.

Another important aspect of e-commerce design is making the customer feel like they are part of the family. A good comparison would be physically walking into a retailer store and having the sales person remember your name and your previous purchases. If the system is designed appropriately the consumer will be greeted with a friendly and personal hello followed by information that is focused on their preferences. This process of getting to know the customer is known as personalization and it is geared towards making the shopping experience a most pleasant one for each individual. Decision technology based on customer profiles can complement customer service programs tremendously (Costello, I Know You: Getting Closer to Your Customers)

This concept once again falls back upon the impatience of users. One of the main requirements for new sites is that the concept must be learned in very few minutes. The idea must be visible the minute the site is fully loaded or the site runs the risk of loosing the customer. The Internet is a rapidly growing environment, it is unrealistic to believe that every user that surfs the web is totally adverse to learning anything new, that is just not the case. Users may learn once but if the next site that offers a similar service expects them to learn something new all over again, the truth is that most people will just return to the one they already are familiar with even if this means loosing much of the functionality.

Although it seems unfair that users won. t take the time to look farther into new features, even if they are relatively easy to learn. Users regard the time spending learning something new as unproductive even if it will yield great results at the end. This may seem like a deadlock but it is not, the approach to solve this incongruent is to make sure the users can learn immediately what added value learning this new feature will bring. The first answer a site that requires some further learning should answer the advantages to the users in a brief but descriptive phrase.

The emergence of intelligent interfaces conflicts with several principles of usability. Some of these principles include user control, making the system predictable, and making the system transparent to the user.(Nielsen, Usability as Barrier to Entry) If intelligent agents are going to be used to achieve personalization of the system, no assurance can be given to any of the principles mentioned as well as the effects these agents have on trust and privacy. The conflict arises as of which aspect of the design is going to result in a greater user satisfaction, evaluations must prove that using intelligent interfaces and their adaptive behavior does improve the interaction with the user.

Globalization of e-business makes the spectrum the much harder. A business cannot expect to communicate throughout the world with a single user interface, or simply a translated one. The concept of taking the business across the world is not as simple as translating the text into the corresponding language. The back end technology does not necessarily have to change, but the front end must reflect the changes in culture, buying trends etc& The society in France may not envision, shop for, music CD. s in the same manner as the society in the USA. In many countries outside the United States the Internet is much more expensive where users are still paying for every minute they are online, many users are also still using outdated browsers that may not work with the current technology well. (Englier, Global e-commerce)

Global interfaces are said to be impossible to achieve, one of the major limitations is the inability of adapting the variations of language, culture, domain and education level to the information sources. A challenge to user interface researches is the ability to change consumer. s perspective from high-level summary information to a specific paragraph in a document or a scene in a film. (Fernandes, Global User Interface Design) Global e-commerce has further difficulties providing common standards and security for the global user community, copyrights are also complicated, and the balance between freedom of speech against offensive and libelous use. When involving different parts of the world and culture the answers to these limitations may not be very straightforward, if at all possible.

Some of the cultural issues that impact the design of the user interface include nationalism, language, which may also include dialects, social context, time, currency, cultural values, symbols, and esthetics. How to use the information gathered by considering all these aspects to develop a successful interface is a highly complex task. (Adam, Globalizing business, education, culture through the Internet)

The standardization of interfaces is not at all easy because when designing for the web the main issues are information architecture and task flow, according to Jakob Nielsen in "User-Supportive Internet Architecture" these are two tasks that cannot be standardized. The reason given for the inability of standardization is because they are individually related to the specific nature of the information and whatever the site is attempting to portray. The problems with certain standards that have become common place are that many times what are considered bad design elements, also known as de-facto standards.

A typical approach of designing a web site is to look around at what other sites are doing and following the same general design. A reasonable measure to deviate from the general design is for the designer to be sure that the alternate design will achieve 100% higher measured usability. Nielsen also portrays some of the examples that display de-facto standards in "When Bad Design Elements Become the Standard" De-facto standards are things such as having the text that is a hyperlink are of the color blue, the color blue is known to reduce readability. Although the association is so familiar to users that most users just get the impulse of clicking by looking at the color without paying much mind at the loss of readability.

One of the common sites used as an example of bad standards is amazon.com, and this classification was achieved by their use of navigation tabs. Studies show that navigation tabs are supposed to be used for rapid switching between alternative views of the same information object. If recalling the use of tabs by amazon you. ll recall that they are used to switch between categories not related to each other. Researchers maintain that users loose the meaning of the tabs if navigating deep inside an area, the suggestion is that to obtain the context of the tabs as are right now all that would be needed is regular hyperlinks. Amazon.com has been many times been referred to as the first e-commerce site, as such many designers use the same approach to design their interfaces. Unfortunately this is causing general consensus on what tabs are used for and they will eventually will lose all traces of what should have been their meaning.

Another trend that is becoming increasingly popular within designing web sites is what is known as the breadcrumb trail. This methodology supports the idea of having the users not feel lost in relation to their location within a site. The breadcrumb trail allows users to view their current location in respect to the parent node as well as the steps taken to arrive there. It also allows the users to jump several nodes in a single click, avoiding cumbersome steps in order to reach the desire destination. This is a very promising technology for the design of e-commerce sites since time is money and by allowing single click to destination minimizes the chance of having the users feeling like the site is wasting their valuable time. (Quint, Back to work on the Web products)

Many people belief that the e-commerce giant amazon.com will sweep the market and leave room for no one else, the following paragraph will negate those assumptions based on facts that most users don. t realize immediately. According to Whit Andrews, there are 5 major reasons why amazon will not be able to take over the market. They are:

No vision, missing critical pieces, the computer interface is not large enough to market all its products, too many competitors, and it lacks an offline strategy. This brings up an important aspect of selling goods online. Merchandising products requires more than just technology, the merchant must have a fairly good understanding of the product being marketed. Users buying CD. s do not require the same interface, experience, than those buying a refrigerator, the needs are different and although the back end technology is necessary to facilitate the transport it is the interface which makes or breaks the sale. In the case of amazon.com the search engine presently used is excellent to search by category but does not came through when running an advanced search across areas (e.g. music, books, etc.) This is a disadvantage to the users since they need to know more information. The easier it is for a consumer to search the more likely it is that he/she will leave satisfy from! ! ! the online experience.

The design of interfaces that attempt to encompass an extensive amount of merchandise has to employ methods where the product is either display successfully in a smaller scope while retaining its informational value. The creation of virtual malls also brings up another stone in the road, how many categories can an interface display without overwhelming the visitor. If we base the future of e-commerce to focus on one stop shopping for everything a strategy must be implemented to avoid information clutter. (Rush, E-Commerce 101: What it is, where it. s going)

Certain things are a must have for the design of interfaces but do not guarantee its success. The designing of an e-commerce interface is even more complicated, since anything that resides within the World Wide Web is immediately global. The audience is extensive and the focus is much more complicated to evaluate. The following are essential needs to the creation of an e-commerce interface. Information must be gathered about the intended audience, this may not be a real easy task, being that the audience becomes large and uncontrollable once a web site is made public. The face to face touch is lost on the web so the tactics to attract and force a purchase must be altered to fit into the new environment. The site should not take too much time to load, society today is one in a rush no one has time to wait for a site to load timeliness is of prime importance and if not the user may click away even before getting a glimpse of the site.

E-commerce takes a different perspective depending in which context is being used be it, business-to-business or business-to-consumer. When considering the business-to-business sales cycle it could be seen that it is typically longer, it usually also eliminates the guessing game of who the users will be since most cases the customers are identifiable. The business users are usually more patient and focus than the individual users.

As portrayed in the article by Jakob Nielsen "Why People Shop on the Web" a survey was conducted to 2,929 Internet users in Denmark from which most had purchase something from the Web. These users were asked what was the most important reason people shop on the Web? The results are placed in the table below.

The results indicate a change in the customer. s preference; Web shoppers do not considered price the most important aspect. Most of the answers had some relation to making it easy, pleasant, and efficient to buy and not as concerned with the price tag.

A common understanding of problem solving is the fact that it is based upon experiences, this is a limitation when reference in the context of e-commerce technology. E-Commerce, as it. s known today has not been around long enough to be used as examples of errors found and solutions to those errors. Many of the sites that attempted to make a presence in this network world were unsuccessful but not enough information can be gathered from this cases to form a solid solution that could become the standard throughout this industry. Presently there is no technology available to supplement or even augment traditional catalogs. Users are forced to remember store addresses of suppliers for the products they want. (Lincke, Mediating electronic product catalogs)

Simply put anyone who wants to make a presence on the new information world must treat the Internet and its Web as a business partner. Traditional services design user interfaces to treat users as suppliants who will simply have to learn to ask the right questions to get the right answers, this is not going to work for the world of e-commerce. Designers must start studying the trends of real people, the answers to real trends are those that must be implemented onto the user interface, the designer no longer have full control, the ball has turned and the users are the ones placing demands on how things are to be done. The future of e-commerce can be described simply by saying web mall, made possible by the use of portals. Although shopping on line by simply clicking a button is extreme convenience, users become more demanding as time passes and e-commerce becomes more and more popular. Virtual malls give the users the capability of searching for a wide range of produ! ! ! cts from a single location. This will eliminate the need to search with different search engines it will be much more like the popular phrase one-stop shopping. Some belief that the future of e-commerce is amazon.com, on September 29^th the CEO announced their plans for the future, going from selling books to becoming a seller of everything. Amazon.com is responsible for starting many of the trends in e-commerce today such as one-click shopping, customer reviews and even online gift wrapping, regardless this does not mean the market is or ever will be exclusively theirs. (Brooker, Amazon vs. everybody) The strategy of creating a virtual mall where shoppers are free to search for any product they need seems to be the trend for the future but competition is harsh and amazon.com has not made money in a long time making the life expand of their business questionable.

Users are the driving forces of this technology as well as the largest impediment. Like all consumers the demands never seem to end. What seems to be yet another driving force of this technology is the way the users are expecting to view the products. While speaking with Mr. David Calhoun, the person heading out the project of making Amano Cincinnati Co. make its presence into the e-commerce world. Mr. Calhoun. s perspective is a bit leaned towards the artistic aspect of the interface. According to Mr. Calhoun it will soon no be enough to view the picture of the product as a flat surface, a rotation of 360° to allow the users to see what it looks like 3 dimensionally will soon become an essential part of marketing products online. Presently all products presented within web sites should always be presented with the dimensions and a short high level description. Access to the detailed description should always be made comfortably available, the users should never get t! ! ! he impression that the site is trying to hide something from them. Mr. Calhoun also emphasized the use of navigational maps as the way of the future. There. s no humanly possible way that the designer can understand how every user thinks so the design needs to be broken down into manageable sizes.

The success of e-commerce depends on the ability to attract non-computer-literate people to use them with ease. Much like driving a car or talking on the telephone, electronic commerce follows the same rules, the users do not care how the inner workings really work the end result is the important point. Electronic commerce will make significant advantages as long as the interface is kept simple and can be used in the same context a telephone is being used today.

Like with any other type of interface design it is impossible to indicate what is the correct way of portraying the information, but there are always important aspects that should be kept in mind and there are also always needed features. One requirement for e-commerce sites is that the contact numbers and addresses should always be displayed. Trust is essential for any type of commerce, trust mechanisms must be developed to give buyers, sellers, and intermediaries an accepted level of confidence of the system. The last thing a business wants is the consumer to think that they have something to hide. Let the customers choose the method to communicate, do not force them to use a particular method or else the diversity of the users may be negatively affected. (Outing, When it comes To E-commerce, Think Different!) Companies must also keep in mind that the scope of e-commerce is not limited to products; the culture of the organization must also change accordingly. Anoth! ! ! er of the complicated aspects of e-commerce sites is that increasing the traffic does not necessarily translate into more sales. Some analysis indicated that background patterns or the number of buttons on the storefront had no affect on the sales, but users always request well designed navigation features.

When thinking about e-commerce in a global context the major requirements are to understand the needs, tasks, and environment of the users. The way of life and the open set of everyday behaviors also taken into consideration the ritualized practices, all these encompass user culture.

In summary a site within the e-commerce environment must always take the user into consideration first. According to Ron Scheer, in "Make your web site easy to use" designers must organize and be ready to reorganize, focused on the purposes and intentions. Always remember your brand, make things easy to find, make content easily understood, anticipate user interactions, if technology makes it possible help users decide what action to perform. When considering the navigation aspects of the site, make it as flat as possible. Make options mutually exclusive make sure the user realizes where the links take them. Create patterns that are easily remembered and make sure that the road from beginning to end does not seem tedious to the users. Designers are not done when the site is implemented and published, tests must be made, regular maintenance should be done to assure up to date content and simplicity. Although these are requirements they do not ensure that the! ! ! site will be successful, nevertheless they are essential for the opportunity to survive.

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