Customer-Centered Design: A New Approach to Web Usability

Foreword

At the time of this writing (2002), e-commerce has a bad name. Many investors stay far away from anything that has “e” in its name and even farther away from pure-play e-commerce. This is understandable because we have just come out of a period where many e-commerce sites went under. A great many of these closed sites seemed to be based on a business model of losing money on every shipment but assuming that this would be OK because they were Internet companies. Many of these same sites also went overboard with expensive, but useless, web design that made it hard to find anything and prevented many users from shopping. I can only cry dry tears over the death of these many clueless e-commerce sites. Good riddance.

There were also some good ...