Systems, Designs, Innovation of Amazon.com - Assignment Example

Systems, Designs, Innovation Amazon.com Introduction One of the most important issues with modern business is that design of material such as the packaging, branding, logos, etc is very important. The way a product is designed determines how much market it can get. The same case applies for information systems. While the technical part of the information systems such as the internal logical of software is important, the user interface also plays a very important role in determining the success or failure for that matter of the products. Websites, especially ecommerce websites are the epitome information systems graphical user interface design. Behind the website laws hundreds of thousands of beautifully designed code. However, it is not necessarily the source code that matters to the users, it is the graphical user interface. If the information is displayed well, it will determine how useful the product will be to the users who visit the site. Ecommerce websites are like business systems only that tin their case, the users are not the employees in a firm, but the public who access it. In designing these systems one has to consider this. In fact, unlike systems used in a organization by the employees, these websites need even better designs because there is no time to train every user to use the website. Not only should they be easy to use and intuitive, they should also be captivating and engaging to the users. Ecommerce sites are becoming very import of modern commerce as the internet is becoming the way to do everything including shopping. In this regard, this design evaluation has chosen to evaluate an ecommerce site. And what better ecommerce site to evaluate that amazon.con which was the first ecommerce site in the world. The website will be evaluate din the following factors; Ease of use, intuitiveness, engagement, Ease of use Amazon.com is one of the sites which have gone through numerous changes over time. As these changes have been made, the site can be seen as having achieved a number of design steps which has made the site easy to use. Being an ecommerce site, evaluating its ease of use should consider two main issues as follows; Finding products The site has become a very easy online site and finding things on the site is even easier as the site is designed to guide a user to the items he may need. This has been achieved by the fact that the site groups the products according to category and the links to these groups are placed on the right side column of the site. The users can click on these links to select the products they want. The amaxon.com site also took enough care to make sure that the site is not clambered with items. As much as it is an ecommerce, the design has made the site less congested by making the home page clearer and more appealing by placing more appealing graphics on the home page. Fig 1.0 screenshot of amazon.com’s homepage However, the site places a number of items at the bottom of the homepage. Each of these items are represented with a clear photo of about one inch by one and a half inch in dimensions. The size of the graphics makes it visible enough without making it too large to take too much space. Each of these picture icons is accompanied by a inch which the user can click to get more information about the product. Fig 1.1 Screenshot showing amazon.com product catalogue (notice the ratings) Clicking on the link not only provides more information but also leads to the electronic cart. To help the user know how the other buyers think about the product, each product is rated using the five-star rating system and this done by the customers. Customers who have bought and used a product can rate the product and the rating are displayed for other buyers to use as a way to know how good or and ht product is, while this may look like a simple and useless design strategy, this is extremely important and as Maxwell (2012) says, this customer rating function can drive purchases of the product as customers depend on the ratings to decide which products are worth looking at. Checking out It is useless to evaluate an ecommerce site without looking at the e cart. Checking out is one area where most users find problems with. The amazon.com checking out system is design to make this easy and to make it intuitive. This has been achieved both at the design level and the technical level. First, for users who have used the system in the past, the site makes it easy to move out using already existing billing and shipping address. Like most online businesses, amazing has taken up the many online payment systems in order to make sure that there is ease of checking out and that everyone is taken care of. Fig. 1.2 showing product details, notice the electronic cart at the right side Managing the e-cart Amazon was probably the first online ecommerce site to use cookies to manage carts. By using web cookies, the site is able to make it possible for customers to maintain their online carts over a long time. What this means is that the users can load their online cart for some days and only pay days later. In this regard, if a customer selects a product and places the product in their electronic cart they don’t have to make the checkout immediately but can wait for some says. It is also necessary to note that as a person waits, he or she can continue adding more productions and removing some products. This gives the online shopper at amazon.com a feel of shopping in a block and mortar store where they can easily add and remove products from his cart. At the same time, the online cart keeps a track of the bill of the customer so that the customer can manage her bill by remaining or reducing the amounts of some of the products should he feel that the bill is too high. This simple but important design issues at amazon.com is really necessary and everyone is able to use the system in an easier way. Intuitiveness Intuitiveness refers ability of a system to not only be easy to use but its ability to help the user be able to know what to expect. This is one area where the amazon.com is able to achieve very well. For instance steps which one has to go though are local and one can easily know what he or she is expected to do. First, intuitiveness of the site can be seen in the way the cart is designed. The cart is designed in a way that makes the system help the customer to move out of the system easily. Intuitive systems as Westeen (2009) says are important especially in increasing productivity. For public systems such as amazon.com, an intuitive system is important because the easier the system is to use, the better for the firm due to the fact the customer will be willing to use the system absent which means repeat sales. Failing to provide an intuitive system would make it harder for the system and this would make it harder to make the customers want to come back again. At the same time, the fact that amazon.com is easier to use means that customers will be willing to buy more products. Just lie in a physical supermarket, if it is easy to go around and get products, customers will spend more and buy more products. Amazon.com has made this possible by making the site easy and intuitive. Engagement Engagement in this situation refers to the system engages the user. This is what web design professional call eye candy. Eye candy refers to the website being sleek and enjoyable to look at amazon.com has achieved this by making the website sleek and good to look at. After landing on the home page, one is met by beautiful graphics that inspires one to explore the site even further. Currently, the appearance of a beautiful lady is an indication of a eye candy. The lady walks across the page, giving the page some life and making the user feel that he is not ion a website but on a store. The use of color balance and high-definition graphics also makes the site pleasing to look at and browse around. Some negative issues include; Too heavy The website is a little too heavy. Heavy in this case refers to the size of content in terms of data. High definition graphics seem to be heavier as opposed to low definition graphics. While high definition graphics have the advantage of giving the website a sleek look, they can be an issue if the customers have a problem with their internet connection speeds. Amazon.com has very high definition graphic which are good for improving the look and feel of the website. On the other hand, this can have a problem with accessibility. However, the designers must have figured that since most of the people who access amazon.com are American citizens most of whom have high speed internet connection; it would be comfortable to make the site sleek at the expense of making it light. Adverts on the site Many visitors dot like seeing advertisements on the site. Amazon.com places some advertisements on the site and this can be a setback to its design. Most successful websites are those that refrain from placing adverts in their home page. Not only are those adverts a distraction to the users, they can also be annoying especially not well managed. By placing these adverts on the site, the design of the site has been compromised. Too much scrolling down needed One trick in making a website most useful is by making sure that the homepage is in the What You See Is What You Get status. By What You See Is What You Get, this means that what one sees after landing on the homepage is everything there is to see in the home page without having to scroll down. This would require that the site not need a user to scroll up and down or left to right. However, looking at the site indicates that one has scroll a lot downwards to get to the bottom of the homepage (Winston, 2009). This is a design drawback because it makes the website sell to have too much information. What amazon.com has failed in this design is by making the website to be too long down that users have to scroll down. This has two main setbacks to the design. One, some users especially those who are not used to WebPages may fail to scroll down and in this case they may not be able to access the products which would lead to loss of sales. Secondly, even for those customers who will scroll down, it gives a feel that the website is not well designed. There are a number of issue which must be considered is this was to be corrected. First, the site’s home page can be made composition and include all the extra information in the others pages. Secondly, the information can be further condensed so that is can fit in the page without one having to scroll down. This will help in making sure that the website looks sleet and professional. The success of a simple homepage can be seen in goole.com. Google.com was the first site to make use of a simplified homepage. While Google provides a lot of information and products, its homepage is one of the simplest and this has been seen as a strategy to make the site more appealing. While amazon.com may not be suited with simple website as Google, it can still this idea and try to make its homepage much easier to use and much more accessible. Results page Like most professional pages, amazon.com also includes search functionality. The results page after a search can be seen as both good and bad. In the pro side, the site page is clear with the information presented in a way that is easy to access. However, the search is less organic and many searches don’t give the desired or expected results. This is a major drawback to the design of the website and this must be looked up to make sure that the user’s experience is increased while using the site. Bibliography Maxwell, J. (2012). Modern Markettig: Desing as Markettin Strategy. New York, NY: Pearson Books. Westeen, P. (2009). Designing Intuitive Systems. New York NY: John Willey & Sons. Winston, K. (2009). Creating USeful Websites . New York, NY: Pearson, Books. Read More