Identifying subtasks of m-commerce website through scenario-based design

Abstract

Due to the tremendous penetration speed of pocket-size mobile devices, surfing the internet on the go is rapidly becoming a preferred life style for people nowadays. Smooth transition from e-commerce to mcommerce requires that businesses recognize a major paradigm shift in web interface design. While many studies have focused on obtaining functionalities requirements and have identified many critical design factors, most of them have ignored the importance of non-functional requirements, which only can be elicited by a task-oriented methodology. Three rounds of focus groups were held in order to collect ideas and opinions from eleven participants, and several scenarios for m-commerce website were generated. This study intended not only to identify tasks and subtasks by following the concepts of the scenariobased design, but also to propose design guidelines for developing subtasks in activity layer, information layer, and interaction layer with an in-depth description of tasks proposed by the study.