E-Commerce, E-Business, and E-Government - Assignment Example

1.1 Needs Analysis This website intends to produce a new idea for Australian tourist activities and will allow to user to retrieve all information about Australian touring sites while staying at home. Currently, potential tourist; married couples, elders planning their holidays and youth seeking for adventures have difficulties in finding a thrilling and exciting place that will be memorable in their lives hence this web site will give them this information. The website intends to give users up-to-date information on the upcoming events, touring sites of all possible places in Australia. Users will be able to get detailed information about various places and compare prices before booking the places. There system will be able to help users book places for holiday that they find interesting and exciting. Users are also alerted of the upcoming events via their e-mail upon their subscription, these services also enable users to unsubscribe from the alert services this is a free service. 1.1. Content analysis Home page (index.php) External Interface and Data Flows The general system incorporates the use graphical user interface (GUI), window icons, mouse and Drop down menus. The system provides an easy to use interface with icons placed strategically same consistent positions to increase learn-ability of system users. The first page of the system is a home page where users are able to view news of upcoming events and a search platform for the touring sites. facilities. Fig 1.0 Home Page Booking of holidays Exception Handling and views The system is capable of capturing errors in case a user enters invalid data to the system. It also contains the options of telling the user on how to recover from the error he/ she has encountered during the data entry. E.g. if the user has entered a wrong date of touring like a date past the booking date, entering wrong phone number. Touring sites This system uses the keyboard and the mouse for inputs in place of forms and radio buttons and drop down menus respectively. The information about touring sites, information About Australia and upcoming event is given to the users. Users have an option of searching specific information they are interested in. 1.3. Competitive analysis Website evaluation methods are an important tool to gather information for the development and design of websites to ensure acceptance by the users. Keeping this in mind exploratory research is conducted to find out what type of information is looked for by visitors and the parameters which influence and motivate them to visit the destination. site Interactivity Customer oriented User support User requirements Proposed website User are can sign up to get updates through their mail Customers provide feedback and about the content and services. Help system available The website provides updated information in terms of news updates and alerts to the users Web A No sign up option Users only view contents without commenting. Help system available No alerts are provided Web b No signup option No feedback facilities Help system available Users have no other way of getting information apart from visiting the site 1.2. Site layout of proposed site 1.5. Navigation Users are able to move from one page to another because links to other pages is clearly indicated with both side and top menus which have the features of dropping down to give users more options in navigation. Icons are used to enable easy learnability of the system, normal convention and shortcuts are also used for easy adoption to the system by the users. 1. Design Description Effectiveness of a website is a function of Information content, Interaction and Interchange functions, Customer oriented webpage design, Advertising products and services, Ease of use, Technical Quality, Website registration with user id and Promotional direction of the website are the important parameters on the basis of which website is evaluated ( Jie Lu and Zi Lu, 2004). The following is a design description 1.1. site content The greatest challenge to the website developers in case of tourist seeking destination information is the amount of information overload which occurs in internet users because of low cost of information search which leads the user to undertake a more intensive search for information.(Biswas, 2004). The following are some of the contents that the website will offer to the users. Interaction and Interchange functions: Interactivity is the uniqueness with online marketing. Bender (1997) defined interactivity helps the viewers of the website to “interact” with the information that has been placed there. Users can control their viewing experience within the limitations of available information. Information relevant to tourism is presented such as train timetables, hotels and souvenir information, supporting information such as maps and product catalogues will be provided. Multimedia content: Visitors often find tourist websites via search engines, it is important to grab their attention before they search for alternative websites and the use of photography and other forms of multimedia information is a good first step toward this objective. Advertising products and services: It involves publishing information about products and services about the destination without price. It talks about the tourism activity in the place or destination, information about special local products and services available in that destination and tourism guide. Advertising product / information with price information which provide information regarding tourism packages and ticket prices this site will not offer transportation prices and hotel accommodation services. This gives a understanding to the visitor about the place for instance, how expensive the place is. Ease of use: It is an important component in website design and an effective way to attract online customers. The users in Australia especially in rural areas are not so much used to internet so this site should be easy to navigate and get the information they are searching for. It is user friendly and guides visitors where to go, where to stay, what to do and how to get there. Technical Quality: It directly influences the performance by not only retaining the characteristics of traditional tools but also taking full advantage of the mediums unique characteristics. The browser compatibility checks how well the webpage is displayed when viewed with different browsers. The readiness check shows whether the search engines and directories can index the web page correctly. Load time checks how fast a page loads under different modem speeds. Dallert and Kahn (1999) found that long load times leading to long waiting times can negatively influence the viewers evaluation of a website. Dead links checks show if a page has a dead link. Website registration: Studies done in the past say visitors like being able to search for information without sharing any personal information like email addresses. It is not mandatory for user on this site to register before viewing the content, they can only sign up if they want to subscribe to alert services. Interactivity: Online booking and payments need are encouraged and protection is given to visitors like user id and password. The proposed website will be customer centric. : The authors feel that the first step in designing any website and to make it rich, tourist requirements should be determined and all the functions which they are looking for needs to be incorporated. Providing a large amount of update and attractive information followed by ease of use is what majority of the visitors like which is already discussed in the few research studies which is lacking in these websites. Richness in information and content: the proposed website provides care needs to improve the attractiveness of the websites and also in terms of information and value added services like availability, status of event, prices at a particular place 1.2. Visual design Information plays a key role in tourism purchase decision by making the offer tangible, helping in mental imagery and reducing risk. Hanna J.R P and Millar R.J (1997). Providing trustworthy, dependable and reliable information should be the prime motto of tourism websites. I applied the ten usability heuristics by Nielsen and Monich 1. Visibility of system status At all times the user is able to see and understand what the system is doing. For example, file access usually takes time and as such, unless the user receives clues from the system, he or she may not know if the action to open/save/close/update a file has been recognized (or completed) or not. 1. Match between system and the real world The system is designed based on the existing system, that is the new system looks and feels like the earlier system i.e. activities that make up the task were not changed in sequence. 2. User control and freedom The interface is developed to allow the users to do what they want to do. Less options result in less satisfaction. 3. Consistency and standard The consistencies that were preserved in the user interface include: labeling, terminologies, graphic conventions, components, layouts and so on. The order of the menu bar is the same for all windows; position of similar buttons is the same. Many guidelines, principles and even software design systematic approaches are oriented towards consistency. 4. Error prevention Te system is designed to reduce errors. For example when a user fills a form and I the Id number enters a word the system will not accept it a will inform him/her of this error and how to go about it. 6. Recognition rather than recall Remembering what something means or how to achieve a certain task is harder and takes longer than recognizing it. This is because human short term memory has a limited capacity with a high decay rate. I subdued helped the user by providing combo boxes, radio buttons est. 7. Flexibility and efficiency of use. Users explore and grow with the system as they become used to it. Users will also have preferred methods for interacting with any system. Consequently many systems provide numerous ways for the user to perform any given action, from working their way through the system hierarchy to selecting a task from a menu to shortcut keys. All these are provided in the system. 8. Minimalist design I aimed to reduce the amount of information displayed at any one time and only display information that is directly relevant to the task in hand. However, there is a balance between reduced complexity and minimizing the number of steps to achieve the desired results. 9. Error recognition, diagnosis and recovery. It is important that users are told when an error has occurred. This triggered me to develop effective error messages that provide a solution or a way out of the situation. I provided the definition of the error and buttons like back, cancel and okay to allow the user choose the appropriate action. 10. Help and documentation. In order to support the system use you need to understand how people make sense of the world around them since the general rules that guide us in life will be those that we apply to most situations including the use of computer systems. Give as much support to the user of the system as possible: these include user manual, and this documentation. Help facility enables the user to understand how to navigate through the system with ease and in maintenance of the system. 1. Website standards The website will use 2. Acronyms and abbreviations ASP HTML SQL GUI References Al Masharis M & Al Sanada (2002), “A best practice model for measuring readiness levels for e-commerce, ebusiness and e-government applications”. 9th European conference on IT evaluation, p. 11-16. Bender D.E (1997)’Using the web to market the hospitality, travel and tourism product or service’, HSMAI Market review, Vol14, No3,pp 33-37. Bonn M.A & Fur H.L (1998)”Using internet as a pleasure planning tool: An examination of socio demographic and behavioral characteristics among internet users and non users”’ Journal of Hospitality and tourism research, Vol 22 No:3,pp 303-317. Brown A. (2002). “The evaluation of Fortis Bank’s internet business website”. 9th European conference on IT evaluation, p. 87-98. Burgess L.J Cooper & C.Alcock (2001) “The adoption of web as a marketing tool by Regional tourism associations in Australia,” in The twenty-fifth Australasian conference on information systems, Coffs Harbour,Australia,4-7 December 2001, pp 493-502. Burke, J.F & Gitelson .R (1990) “Conversion studies : Assumption, Applications, Accuracy and abuse”, Journal of travel Research. Read More