15 Usability of Design by Customer Websites
Oon Yin Bee and
Halimahtun M. Khalid
Institute of Design and Ergonomics Application, Universiti Malaysia Sarawak,
Malaysia
The Design by Customer (DBC) approach
is aimed at enabling companies to be more sensitive to what the customer
really wants. The concept implies that users design a product using options
offered by the company in a configuration system, while the latter assembles
the product. There are constraints in providing the configuration system
online, such as the types of product to offer, attributes of product for
customer to design, and so forth. Therefore, design of a catalogue (representing
the customization options) and of a corresponding configuration system is
critical so that customers can be supported effectively in the design process.
More important, what is designed is what the customer gets in the final
product. This chapter reports the results of an experimental study that
evaluates three DBC Web sites on user preferences of Web site features and
e-catalogue-cum-configuration system. Using factor analysis, three generic
factors were extracted for the DBC Web site features, namely: holistic design,
navigability, and timeliness, while for the configuration system itself,
the factors extracted represent design procedure, aesthetic preferences,
information display, and design pleasure. The results also showed that users
preferred top-down hierarchical approach for designing bicycles, watches
and dresses. The Spearman rank correlation performed on the ordinal preference
data showed significant relationships between the hypothesized and measured
ranks for these Web sites. On the basis of this study, we derived specifications
for an online configuration system of future Web sites.
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