Adopting User-centred Development for Arabic E-commerce Websites

Over the past few years the Internet has become an essential business platform by aiding trading, distribution and sales between organisations, consumers, and even between consumers. This has brought ecommerce to an entirely new level which raised some issues in websites usability and the human-computer interaction. Therefore, the objectives of this paper are to identify and analyse the extent to which the site is fulfilling all the user’s requirements and needs. The related work covers the history of human-computer interaction and the benefits of using user-centered approach, which is the methodology been used in this paper. Moreover, a brief comparison between the most important development methods, such as Waterfall and user-centred methods are discussed in terms of addressing the issues of time saving and addressing fulfilment of users’ needs. In order to address most of the issues that is related to the attributes in the usability stage of the evaluation, the data required to manage this study was collected using three research methods; the questionnaire, direct user observation and interviews. An evaluation of the current websites, based on statements of usability goals and criteria were chosen from the Arabic guidelines in the literature, were undertaken in connection with implementing and testing the proposed websites design. Many famous Arabic websites such as JARIR bookstore and Ahmad Abdul wahed website were chosen as a case study in this paper to investigate the usability and interactivity of the websites design. The analysis section includes needs, users and tasks and data analysis, whereas the design phase includes the user interface and database design. At the end of this paper, some recommendations are presented regarding these website that can be considered in developing these website in the future.