Assess the Design and Functionality of Existing and Established Essay

Assess the Design and Functionality of Existing and Established e-Business Sites - Essay Example Greater participation by the individual entrepreneurs and the venture capitalists for the money required for the firm's initiation, maintenance and growth. Some of the new customer's needs that could not be possible by the conventional business practices are satisfied by the e-business along with the traditional needs. (1. William. M. Pride) The potential for using the website itself to collect and analyse the evaluative data, is one of the most exciting prospects for the website evaluators. The most important methodological areas of this type are the use of software to monitor, analyse and report on the utilisation of this site. Another way to employ the website itself for evaluation is to construct online surveys to collect users' information and feed back. Becker gave a detailed description as to how this can be accomplished; he has given the procedure to construct forms and the details of different input that can be created in constructing a form. Common gate way interface (CGI) that can be used to process the data that users submit through online forms, a number of simple and practical approaches to storing and accessing submitted form data including how to have the data automatically sent to an e-mail address and the use of a generic CGI script program that can save the data to disk in a variety of formats that ca n then be imported into databases and statistical programs for analysis have also been described by him. Survey methodology: Surveys can be used during the conceptualisation and development phases to conduct market research, identify potential users and ascertain their information needs and computer expertise. It can be conducted during the implementation and evaluation phases to assess user reactions to both content and usability of the site. Experimental and quasi-experimental designs: Experimental and quasi-experimental designs are the major tools that the evaluators have for addressing the questions like effectiveness, benefit or return attributable to the site itself as opposed to the alternative casual factors. (2.Johns Hopkins) Cognitive walkthrough: The walkthroughs require a detailed review of a sequence of actions. In a code walkthrough, the sequence represents a segment of the program code that is stepped through by the reviewers to check certain characteristics. In the cognitive walkthrough the sequence of actions refers to the steps that an interface will require a user to perform in order to accomplish some task. The evaluators then step through that action sequence to check it for potential usability problems, the main focus of the cognitive walkthrough is to establish how easy a system is to learn. For doing a cognitive walkthrough four things are required: Fairly detailed description of the prototype of the system such as the location and wording for a menu can make a big difference The description of the task the user is to perform on the system, this should be a representative task that most users