Product registration in e-commerce for small and medium companies (SMEs) : Usability aspects
Abstract: People these days are able to buy almost anything online. With a continuously increased E-commerce, small and medium sized companies (SMEs) feel obligated to enter the competitive E-commerce market. Moreover, for small companies with little or no experience in e-commerce it could become overwhelming to get a web-shop up and running. One important tasks in managing a web-shop is to register products into the system. This must be easy and efficient. The focus of this thesis is to answer the question "How can user-centered design principles improve productregistration, particularly in the SME context?". At the start of this study, surveys and interviews were conducted, which showed that product registration is very time consuming at the moment. User tests were conducted to measure the efficiency and the general usability of a system maintaining over 100 active web-shops. Based on the results of the first iteration of the user test conducted, design changes were proposed and implemented. A second iteration of the user test showed improved efficiency and substantially less errors. The most important new design elements were related to navigation, workflow and adjustment of input fields to the data sources. Thus it has been shown that the threshold for SME web-shops to go online can be lowered by a systematic application of user-centered design of the user interface.
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