A Study on the Interface Usability of B2C Hypermarket E-commerce Website

In order to serve the on-line users who do shopping for 24 hours, the on-line shopping systems platform is more complicated than traditional one. Therefore, the user interface usability problems become a critical issue. Take the Yahoo!kimo shopping mall as a test platform. In this paper, the data collection method of thinking-aloud was adopted to record the participants. The video images and verbal protocols were transcribed, segmented and bottom-up coded. 121 problems concerning usability could be classified into 9 types. The usability problems can be classified into five attributes by reviewing the related literatures, satisfaction, efficiency, effectiveness, presentation and help. The result shows satisfaction is the most critical problem (accounts for 32.2%). The result of study accords with Nielsen and Norman (2000) study that gives users a good experience and they are apt to turn into frequent and loyal customers. Therefore, we prove the importance of user- center design (UCD) in e-commerce website interface design.