Developing usability heuristics for Bangladeshi E-commerce websites: a desktop and mobile focused approach

Abstract

In the era of digital technology, the importance of E-commerce has been immense, impacting economies, consumers and businesses alike. In Bangladesh, the use of E-commerce has completely changed the business landscape over the past decade as a result of greater internet access, advancements of financial technology and peoples’ purchase behaviour. It is necessary to ensure E-Commerce websites, being made everyday, are tested on all fronts with one of the major criterias being user experience. Despite major improvements in all forms of testing, usability testing has received very little attention. Usability testing is used to validate the user experience of a website and often evaluating with real-time users is expensive so alternative methods such as heuristic evaluation are on the rise. Nielsen’s heuristics are the most commonly used tool for heuristic evaluation. Developed back in 1994, these rules are generalized and no longer suitable for evaluating modern websites and their experiences in different types of devices. Therefore they also give incorrect results when used on Bangladeshi E-commerce websites. This paper focuses on developing heuristics for E-Commerce websites that users can use both on their personal computers and mobile devices. This paper uses a modified version of Rusu’s methodology to develop new heuristics. A comparative study is then conducted between Nielsen’s heuristics and our proposed new set of heuristics for E-commerce websites using the Method Adoption Model. This evaluation was done by professionals currently working in the industry to reach a valid conclusion.