Designing E-commerce Sites with the Focus on Security and Privacy of Online Customers

Rapid growth of electronic commerce increases the competition among ecommerce firms. These firms need to attract new and retain existing customers. In order to do that, their web sites must be usable and user-friendly. Therefore, web site designers and developers need to be well educated in the human-computer interaction (HCI) field. The development of various checklists contributes to better education of web site designers and developers. As a result, web site designers and developers would follow checklists while designing/re-designing sites improving their usability. One of the most important issues related to usability of e-commerce sites is security and privacy of customers’ information. These issues prevent many people from shopping online. E-commerce firms need to make customers feel secure. In this paper, we present a checklist that would help web developers and designers to improve usability of sites with regards to customer security and privacy. As a result, sites would be more usable, hence, would attract more customers. This, in turn, will enable e-commerce firms to survive the competition.