Improving the Usability of e-Commerce Applications Using Business Processes

Presenter:Te-Yen Liu

2008/02/05

Topic:

The outline Introduction Sample Scenarios Business Processes The Approach for Improving UI Improving the UI using Business Process Usability Study Conclusion and future work

Introduction What is a business process? What is a process definition? e-Commerce application The current problems of e-Commerce

application Determining the steps Inconsistencies between a business process

and the UI’s implementation Increase costs and decrease user productivity

To improve the usability of e-commerce apps

Sample Scenarios What are attributes of Usability?

Learnability, low error rate, memorability, efficiency, user satisfaction.

The call center application Contains several UI components Customer Service Representatives use th

e application to create and manage customer orders.

The original UI of a call center app

Purchase Order” business process

Intent to support the CSR in this Scenarios

The improved UI of a call center app

The improved UI offers

Support for Evolving Business Processes Automatically generate the

components that are in accomplishing the tasks

Support for Context Awareness Support for Automatic Navigational

Transition

Business Processes Three types of annotations:

Activities (tasks) Different roles have different tasks

Control flows Sequence, OR-relations, parallelisms, iteratio

ns, preconditions, postconditions. Data flows

Specify the input, output, or both of an activity.

The Approach for Improving UI

The approach (1/2) Recovering Roles and Their Mappings to

Tasks Recovering Task-UI Bindings. To match:

the task name with the names of UI components the task name with the names of a widget in a UI

component the task name with the data items in a UI

component The name of a task with the names of function

calls (callback) The input and output data of a task with the data.

Task-UI Bindings Example:

The approach (2/2) Inserting Task Event Triggers

Event has three types Start

user performs a menu action end, cancel

the output data of a task have been derived Optional

Only need to verify the data

Dynamic Execution Environment

Showing Navigation Sequences for Business Processes

Providing Context Awareness Guidance

Improving the UI of a Call Center Application Using Business Process

Generating the Dynamic Execution Environment Process Definition Parser (IBM WBM) Role Model Generator UI Model Generator Navigation Sequence Generator Code Generator

Recovering Bindings between Tasks and UI Components Use 5 heuristic

discussed before

Usability Study Study Subjects

Scenarios used in the study

Evaluation Criteria for Usability

Scenario 1

Scenario 2

Scenario 3

Usability and Type of UI

T-test Hypothesis

(alpha = 0.05): The usability

of the improved UI is better than original UI

Usability and Tutorial

T-test Hypothesis

(alpha = 0.05): Tutorial does

not have significant effect on the usability of the improved UI for novice user

Threats to Validity External validity

Others applications and other scenarios A limited number of expert users The novice user groups were graduate

student volunteers Internal validity

A learning effect the order of using original and improved UI, and

scenarios Two-way ANOVA test (alpha = 0.05) There is no visible learning effect between

scenarios, but they believe there is. They don’t think that learning effect will affect the

result

Conclusion and Future Work An approach to restructure the UI and improve

it. Provides navigational guidance Context awareness assistance

The limitations: Specify a single navigation sequence to carry out

business activities Treat each process as independent as others.

Optimize the navigation sequence with fewer clicks and fewer UI components

Permit users to populate data fields in an active process instance

Automate to insert triggers into source code Apply this approach to other applications

Thank you

Q/A