Emphasizing the communication aspects for the successful development of electronic business systems

Abstract.

In order to be successful, web-based electronic business systems have to be developed in such a way that both the customers’ needs and the business intentions of the provider are met. As human-to-human interaction is partly replaced by human-computer interaction in such systems, this requires anticipating the users’ behaviour and paying a lot of attention to the communication aspects.

In this article a development method is suggested that emphasizes the communication aspects in web-based systems. It is based on user profiling and story boarding. User profiles can be used to classify user needs as well as the various kinds of system support for them. The story board describes stories, i.e. navigation paths of users through the system, which can be used to model the behaviour of users.

To discover user profiles and stories, two interleaved activities are suggested: communication analysis and linguistic analysis. Communication analysis addresses typical human-to-human interaction in the application domain and classifies typical communication barriers. We argue that using localisation abstraction and metaphors can help to overcome communication barriers, implying that their use may enhance the users’ understanding and successful navigation through a web site. Linguistic analysis addresses how the activities of the users would be described in natural language. Analysing the used word fields and metaphorical structures may provide guidance for centering the story board around the central activities. We use a typical banking application, on-line loan systems, as an example to illustrate our method.