An Investigation into Usability and Productivity of ECommerce Websites

Abstract

Usability has been the primary way for assuring the quality of web applications. The main challenge in usability is to identify effective usability problems. Addressing the usability problems of e-commerce websites could improve the purchases of products by the customers and they could become the frequent visitors and have loyalty towards the website. Even though the web applications have become more and more sophisticated, they are not yet matured. The main lacuna is a lack of skilled engineers in web applications development and lack of knowledge to create complex and quality websites, which can be used and updated quickly and reliably. An investigation into usability issues of e-commerce websites is not explored much. There are more opportunities to improve the usability of websites. Designing frameworks and metrics helps the developers and managers to assess the usability problems in order to improve usage of their websites. User testing is an added advantage to this which is a real user based assessment technique that supports to identify, specify and visualize the usability problems of complex web applications. User testing assessment technique is an important source of information for usability problems. In this thesis, we propose techniques to specify, visualize, find and document usability problems for web applications using qualitative and quantitative techniques. newlineUsability has direct impacts on increasing productivity of e-commerce websites. Productivity measurement method reduces the time to complete a task, the error rate and increases satisfaction. Most of these improvements can be quantified by measuring saved time, gained revenues, and increased productivity. So, in this research we have given emphasis on usability and productivity of e-commerce websites. newlineFirst, we propose a user testing methodology to investigate the criteria affecting the usability problems of e-commerce websites. In this technique, the usability problems were identified from the real users. From the real users, different weights were identified and were collected for overall usability values calculation of different usability themes. Our technique achieves all usability criterions which undoubtedly increase the number of usability problems identified in web-based software. newlineNext, we propose a novel approach to design an algorithm which is implemented in an automatically generate tool named as JStool for the combined approach in navigation and content (understandability of the text) related criteria from the website. The content related criteria were word count, unique word count, complex word count and syllable count of a web page. We have proposed the various algorithms for traversing, word count, unique word count, complex word count and syllable count. We have developed a tool for the above purposes. The advantage of our tool is that it helps in detecting complex text within a web page that cannot be understood by all users which turned the web developer and managers of the website domain to redesign the web page for which the user s interaction with the same website is more. newlineFinally, we present a methodology to investigate the criteria affecting the productivity of e-commerce websites. Our proposed Productivity Measurement Methods on Web Services (PMMWS) are presented. Our web-based productivity measurement typically acted as the ratio of task size to the effort with respect to the user perspective. Therefore, we can appraise the average time taken by the proficient user takes in carrying out a transaction as a measure of task size on a website and the effort needed to locate the necessary information. Our approach gives the benefit to the web developer and managers to improve productivity in their web development projects. newlineBesides the theoretical analysis, studies conducted by us, we have also implemented our algorithms to experimentally verify their preciseness with different case studies. newline newline