And so, in the interest of helping e-service providers and their development partners seize the opportunity to do right by their e-customers and create sustainable value, I have attempted to describe the necessary process of developing websites from scratch. To finish. Part of this discipline is talking to customers and effectively translating their needs, attitudes and behaviors into the necessary website experience.
Being Customer-Effective
Things Have Changed
The website moves the customer through a number of screens based on the customer's information. To ensure an effective customer order process, we need to understand how customers search for, evaluate and choose products; Consider how the website leads the customer through the process (which includes interface design, information architecture, . navigation and content); and understand how the order is received and handled by the service provider (business process design and its relationship with the Website).
Why is it so Hard to Create Customer-Effective Web Sites?
Service is Experiential
The company is also responsible for ensuring that the infrastructure supports the website strategy; The business structure and processes should be examined along with the resources. While the website development company provides iterations of the concept and website, the company is responsible for providing feedback and direction.
Putting it All Together
What Customers Want
What kinds of things do they want to do when they're on a company's website? If product information isn't useful, customers are likely to leave your website for someone else's.
Seventeen Customer Directives
Customer-Effective Testing
We need to understand the big picture as well as the specifics of what customers will want to do on a website. We need to talk to clients, prior to development, and involve them at critical points in the development process before we open a website to the public.
Types of Testing
When the website designer comes up with a proposed solution, he starts with a concept for your website. This approach can be useful for companies that need to ensure that the website system provides their customers with the required experience. When usability testing late in development, the structure and organization of the website should already be determined.
In heuristic evaluation, the success of a website would be evaluated against each of the heuristics above. There must be a formal process whereby a business is deregistered from a website before it is accessible to the public. This check-out constitutes formal acceptance of the product offered by the website developers.
From the beginning of the development process, the business and the website development company must agree on which browsers the website should support. Testing should determine that the website works as expected in each browser and the appropriate browser version. Security auditing refers to testing the website and web server configuration to eliminate any security or access gaps.
Testing Techniques
E-Service Requirement Definition
You cannot trade in isolation on the Internet; you are a citizen of an e-community; and that community has its own protocols and cyber culture. When considering the community aspects of your website, you need to consider all the parties that are part of your customers' e-service experience, and why, and consider how they should be brought together on the web. The first most obvious value opportunity is to become customer effective and use the Internet for the benefit of your customers.
The Internet is a dynamic and flexible environment and people will not tolerate the staid mentality of 'let it go and fix it later'. The interactivity of the Internet should allow us to better tailor information and utility to individuals who create their own experiences with our websites. Furthermore, companies that tailor their products and services to the Internet tend to be more successful.
Sometimes companies try to rehash existing services and processes on the web; they think they can simply "offer that service on the web." However, being useful on the web comes with a whole new set of rules and e-customer expectations. Your services may not be transferred to the web; you may need to recreate them, or offer something completely different or new to be useful to your e-customers. The web gives businesses and customers the ability to act in a synchronous manner (ie to get things done together at the same time).
Key Decisions You will have to Make
Are we ready to develop applications using Internet technologies or will we buy a ready-made product (ie, what is our position on the issue of make or buy). What campaign content will need to be provided on our website - how frequent our campaigns will be and how explicitly we want to link website campaign content and promotion in other media. To what extent do I have to "sell" to e-customers - how well they know our company and our product and service offering.
Confirmation of a product or service order—how we will affirm our role as a value-added online service provider. How will non-privileged e-customers respond to this, and what considerations should be taken into account in website design, eg how privileged audiences should be treated compared to non-privileged ones. Exactly how the online process will work will depend to some extent on the level of connectivity you have with internal systems (ie, what information you know and what information you need to get from the e-client) and what technology you are using to develop the website (some technologies give you less ability to engineer processes than others, such as those that come "out of the box").
What will be mandatory fields (ie which fields e-customers absolutely must complete for us to do our job). What contexts need to be created now for extended use later (ie what future proofing needs to happen now). How changeable will different content areas be – which will be the most volatile, and how can we build a navigation framework that allows us to make the necessary changes over time (ie, what future proofing is required now).
The Requirement Definition Process
Team meetings should include a representative cross-section of the company, from strategy makers to people who deal with customers face-to-face or face-to-face. Then, later in the development phase of the project, there would be a more rigorous review of each process. The answers you get will give you a good sense of the areas to cover in the group sessions and the relevant case studies and customer scenarios to explore.
Interviewing people from different areas of the company will also help you determine the best composition of the group sessions. And because the Internet is an active medium, we can also associate specific results with each use of the Internet. The process of identifying target audiences tends to be intuitive; people identify groups of people according to the nature of the exchanges they have with them.
And because we begin by identifying customers and the nature of the interactions they have with the company, a customer-centric focus is adopted and carried naturally through the application of Model 1. This report should capture the core activities of the groups, the results theirs, and the issues discussed. Often, the e-business strategy and vision statement will be part of the executive summary of the workshop report.
The Brief
E-Service Development and Implementation
Once you've selected the website development company(s) you want to work with, you may want to create a charter for the project. The charter could be available online as part of a project website (or an extranet accessible to the integrated project team and other connected stakeholders). The project website can be hosted and maintained by the company or website.
The initial product specification defines the scope of functionality that the company expects the website development company to provide (so it validates the work done in additions without trying to define it beyond the level of knowledge that was at that time). Purchase—the online ordering process (the definition of this online process will probably come later, but you should define any information that needs to be provided specifically in relation to the purchase, such as product availability details). If we think of the seventeen customer instructions, many of them relate to poor interface content – the e-customer simply does not receive enough of the right information about what they can do and what is happening.
The business and website development company must jointly determine the content required to facilitate these types of processes. The exchange process between the e-customer and the company takes place via the website interface. You will need to determine how promotional content is integrated into the site as much as new product information.
Troubleshooting
A Customer-Effective Design Approach and Process
Quick Search is right there at the entrance to the Amazon.com site and allows a-. In the case of the Amazon.com order process, products do not need to be configured - a book is a book is a book. Amazon.com helps secure new e-commerce customers by providing feedback on order details during the ordering process.
In addition, using Amazon.com email extends the ordering process from the interface process. Instructions on how to contact Amazon.com if they have a question (via email and phone). Of course, these reviews must be useful, and Amazon.com encourages usefulness by allowing e-.
As a contextual designer, you will need to consider how relevant content is created in response to the actions of e-customers, such as the contextual provision of Amazon.com. You will also need to consider other activities that e-customers should perform on Amazon.com and consider the relative level of exposure required. It is interesting to note that there is no page-level search on Amazon.com.
