Business-to-Consumer Best-Practice Update
Revenue for digital media and technology in general, and e-commerce in particular, has grown. Turnover for e-commerce has increased from about £20 billion in 1998 to about £2 trillion per annum globally. Hardly surprising then, that commercial best-practice has attracted resources, resulting in its development and advancement. Future research needs to take account both of how to apply current best-practice in the acquisition of HCI-EDPs and what format best suits their application to current best-practice design. To the latter ends, the changes to best-practice, since the completion of the research, are identified and implications for best-practice and for HCI-EDP application format noted. Future research would do well to take account of both sets of implications. Such changes in best practice follow:
1. From design for usability to design for user experience (UX).
2. From design methods to design methods, enhanced by technical advances in data capture, as exemplified by UX analytic tools, such as Adobe Analytics and Content Square.
3. From simple online transaction testing to online ‘design funnel’ testing.
4. From simple online transaction testing to online ‘AB’ testing.
5. From structured analysis and design methods to ‘lean UX’ design methods.
6. From the design problem to the minimum ‘viable product’ (MVP).
7. From process design methods to ‘atomic’ design methods.
8. From individual online user testing to online ‘scaled up’ user testing.
Note that in all cases, the full range needs to be included.
All these best-practice changes can be recruited to the design practice, used in the case study, to support the acquisition and validation of HCI-EDPs. Such application, however, would necessarily require the mapping of the novel change concepts, such as ‘lean’ and ‘minimum viable product’ to those of the conception, such as ‘design problem’ and ‘design solution’ and, indeed, ‘HCI-EDP’. The format of the latter for best practice application was an issue at the time of the research and remains an issue now.
In conclusion, as concerns e-commerce systems, it is clear, that they were a promising area of research, in terms of their potential for commercial development. The selection of physical goods e-commerce transaction systems has also proven to be an area of commercial interest and success. There is no shortage of such systems, with Amazon emerging as perhaps the best known, and possibly biggest. Information e-commerce systems, however, have almost disappeared in the form characterised in Cycle 2 development. The general class-level description of transaction systems for information may still be valid, for example, the sale of virtual goods in games or the metaverse, but SMS news alert services as such hardly exist. However, the particular example is less important than the development of the HCI-EDP conception and the class-based approach themselves.