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 the 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, iterations, 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