Human-Computer Interaction-Based Usability Assessment of an E-Commerce Web Prototype

The rise of e-commerce has made usability and user satisfaction very important for web systems. When the interface of your website is hard for users to understand or navigate, it leads to user frustration and unsuccessful completion of the task at hand. Human Computer Interaction (HCI) is a discipline that sets forth guidelines and evaluation methodologies to ensure interactive systems are efficient, effective, and usable. This article presents an interactive prototype e-commerce web application created solely for academic assessment in terms of design and usability. A structured task based usability assessment was performed on the prototype by having participants complete common online purchases while using the prototype. Quantitative usability data was gathered using the SUS (System Usability Scale) and by measuring the accuracy of completed purchase attempts. The overall results show that applying HCI principles to a website designed at the prototype level produces a marked increase in the usability accuracy of the website as well as demonstrating how effective user-centered design is even at this early stage of development. Additionally, this study gives strong support to the continuing use of prototype assessment for providing reliable insights into the usability of a given design as well as giving helpful insight into how the design should be further improved. Guiding users in the early stages of usability assessment is critical to making systems perform better and making users happy.