User-Centered Design and Web Site Engineering: An Innovate Teaching Approach
Susy S. Chan, Rosalee J. Wolfe
A user-centered approach to Web site engineering is critical to the development of effective e-commerce sites. Clear information architecture, easy navigation. and user interfaceareessentialconsiderations forusability Bringingiterative usability testing methods, such as card sorting and paper prototyping, to Web site engineering helps to increase a site's success by focusing on its users. Such approach differs .significantly from software engineering methods rooted in traditional systems development life cycle. Three pedagogies for e-commerce courses were developed to address usability issues and Web-site engineering. The pedagogy which facilitated collaboration between Web developers and usability consultants showed more favorable results as compared to pedagogies for teaching these development methods separately. This collaborative consulting approach is a cost effective way to teach Web site engineering with a clear focus on Web site users. Through this approach, students also acquired an understanding about the complexity of iterative, multi-disciplined group work in a fast-paced development environment.
Susy S. Chan is currently an associate professor and the director ofInformation Systems and E-Commerce Technology in the School of Computer Science, Telecommunications and Information Systems at DePaul University. She was the cocreator of DePaul University's pioneering master and baccalaureate programs in e-commerce. As a former cra and vice president for planning at DePaul, Dr. Chan developed its six-campus IT infrastructure. Her research and teaching is focused one-commercedevelopment, ITstrategies, enterprise transformation, and ERP procurement. She received a PhD in instructional technology from Syracuse University.
Rosalee J. Wolfe completed a PhD in computer science after earning a master degree in music at Indiana University and became a NASA Fellow. She was instrumental in developing DePaul University's baccalaureate program in humancomputer interaction, the first of its kind in the United States. She has beenactive in ACM-SIGGRAPH (the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Graphics) and has authored and edited books and articles on various aspects of computer graphics and HCI. Dr. Wolfe is currently a professor in the School of Computer Science, Telecommunications and Information Systems at DePaul University and enjoys collaborating with Dr. Chan on projects involving usability issues in e-commerce.
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