Systematic Usability Inspection of Web Based “Business Processes”

Modern web sites are more and more including complex business processes closely related to the core business of proponent companies. Processes manage resources (books, cars, train tickets, flight reservation, etc.) closely related to the core business of proponent companies and their execution is constrained by the underlying business logic and architecture. Web processes are executed by means of a web application which has to obey to the navigational interaction paradigm. These three characteristics of web business processes raise a number of usability issues up yet uncovered by existing usability methods. This paper introduces a set of heuristics, abstract tasks and a novel inspection method (named PUW) which enable usability experts to analyze the effectiveness of information and navigation provided to support the resource management and process workflow execution. Compared to existing inspection methods, the approach steps over addressing entire process execution usability instead of focusing on its composing pages by their own.