I saw this Google video  that portrays the online shopping experience as if it would occur in real life.   Its really a great visualization of all the extra steps and frustrations that are more than common place in eCommerce on most websites today.    As technologists we should strive to make things more simple as we automate real life processes.   However, we often tend to try and make things better by adding steps and validations.   By making things more secure we also make them more unusable, as displayed by the captcha example in the video.  One of my favorite  parts since I have never been a big fan of it.

shopping

Check out this video – Checkout in real life

Some things to remember when automating business processes through the web:

1.  Define the process – write down and model the real world process.  This includes not just interaction with the underlining computer system, but how things work in the real world.

2.  Define your actors – develop how the users of the system will interact with it.   While this is a common practice, be sure to define all people that need to interact with the process.

3. Optimize – its not simply good enough to automate the process, you must also look for ways to optimize the existing business process.  Without doing that you often will make the process more cumbersome especially if you are unable to completely automate that process right off the bat.

 

Would you like bread insurance…make sure to untick the checkbox.