CIS 6278-30
E-Commerce Technologies
jojohsu@yahoo.com
Human Factors and Technology Factors in Web Development |
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Introduction
Flash vs. Java Applet
Development Environment
Advantages vs. Disadvantages
Vector Graphics XML vs. HTML XML and HTML both use a very similar syntax. HTML describes the look and feel of a web page; that is, it tells browser how to display data. XML does not tell the browser how to display data. What XML does is to tell what the data in a document are. This is the major difference. While HTML combines data and display, XML separates them. This difference makes XML documents more portable. An XML document can be used in many different types of applications. XML and HTML are different in other two aspects which are described in the following. Here are 3 example XML documents: 1 2 3. To see how HTML looks similar to XML, we can go to "view" menu, and choose "source code." The resulting texts are HTML code. Here is an HTML example.
Case-sensitive
Define Our Own Tags JSP vs. ASP ASP (Active Server Page) and JSP (Java Server Page) are both popular for generating dynamic content for a Web page. ASP is from Microsoft, and JSP is from Sun. In terms of functionality, JSP and ASP are very similar. In the contents, they both have a static part and a dynamic part. The static part is just HTML tags, which will tell the web browsers how to display texts, images, and so on. The dynamic part is the Java code in JSP or scripting languages in ASP. This dynamic part enables contents to be dynamically generated, and it enables session tracking, and database interaction. JSP and ASP both use component objects to embed Java code or scripting languages in HTML; ASP uses Microsoft's proprietary ActiveX components in COM model, whereas JSP uses JavaBeans, which are only Java classes. Beside, JSP and ASP are different in terms of platform supported, scripting language used, and the syntax. Here are example code of ASP and JSP.
Proprietary vs. Open Approach
Scripting Languages
Predefined Objects
Delimiting Tags
XML Style Delimiting Tags
Website Assessment After the discussion on the difference among Flash, HTML, XML, Java, and ASP, we will start to examine six retail sites on-line which are using at least two of the above technologies. Because ASPs and JSPs are both used to dynamically generate an HTML page to the user, functionality-wise, they are the same. So, there is really no difference as far as the consumer is concerned. That is, the technology factor is of less concern here. The human factor is more important. Therefore, to assess a site, the guidelines provided by Dr. Craig Nathanson are extremely helpful. According to Dr. Nathanson, the six key elements that build up a place in the cyberspace are scenic, functional, self-guiding, flowing, familiar, and unique. Under each category, there will be several guidelines which are stated as questions. In this section, I will be assessing six on-line retail stores by following these guidelines. The three websites that are well designed: The three websites whose designs are not so good:
Tiffany & Co.
The following shows the details of assessment for each category.
Bloomingdale's
The following shows the details of assessment for each category.
Old Navy
The following shows the details of assessment for each category.
Longs Drugs
The following shows the details of assessment for each category.
FogDog Sports
The following shows the details of assessment for each category.
Pet Food Direct
The following shows the details of assessment for each category.
Summary of the Assessment of the Six Websites
The assessment done in this paper is based on Dr. Craig Nathanson's research: Rating criteria for building place in cyberspace©.
The Differences Among the Six Websites The six websites are all functional; the functionality is either implemented in JSP or ASP. But since we are the consumers, we do not need to care about how they deliver information to us. As a consumer, I care about how a website makes me feel. Websites that makes their consumers keep coming back are qualified to be called a 'place.' In this research, I think that Tiffany, Bloomingdale's, and Old Navy are places. Longs Drugs' design is not so well. Look at the stats, we see that Longs has the average percentile of 52.83%. What makes it far worst than the others is that it is not scenic. The same thing also applies to the other not-so-good websites, FogDog.com and PetFoodDirect.com. Some people may argue that the look and feel will not affect how successful a site would be, but from the stats in this research paper, being scenic is a must-considered issue. An overview of the stats, we can find that not-so-good websites are poor in all the other aspects as well. They are not functional, self-guiding, flow, familiar, and unique. For instance, PetFoodDirect.com's search engine is kind of weak. I typed 'dry' in order to find dry food, but their search engine does not show what is being listed in its existing aisle 'Dog dry food' and 'Cat dry food.' I think this is a major flaw. They may consider to team up with the mother of all the search engines, google.com. In fact, this is how our school does; our school's main website uses google's search engine, and the search can be limited to our school data only. Longs Drugs also has a very weak search engine. This would be a problem because when customers could not figure out how to find out a product, they would just go to another websites with a few keystrokes and clicks. Familiarity is not an easy issue for those not-so-famous on-line retailers. Famous brand names have the advantage of being well-known, so from the stats I make the assumption that famous brand names tend to score higher in the familiarity category. So how to make an on-line store that does not have a physical presence become familiar? My answer is that it needs to implement the other five key elements: functional, scenic, self-guiding, flow, and unique. There are a lot of successful examples out there: amazon.com, yahoo.com, hotmail.com, etc. These dot-com's all started out as a pure on-line company, but they all have provided the services that people would love to have, so people keep going back to them, and that makes their website become familiar. Something unique about Tiffany & Co. is the use of the combination of ASP and Flash. Although Flash is notorious for the download time, but if use appropriately, Flash can bring a site so much life. However, there are elegant ways to integrate Flash into HTML, but the common solution is to offer two versions of a site - one Flash and the other HTML. Tiffany is a good example of Flash. Flash is also an excellent tool for viewing detail because with Flash, we can scale up and down a graphic without distortion. So, showing details of jewelry is a good application of Flash. Therefore, although Flash may never have the functionality or speed of HTML, it does have its niche. In addition, it does enrich our on-line experiences. In the process of writing this paper, to find out a good example, I thought of famous brand names, such as Tiffany, Old Navy, and Bloomingdale's. When thinking of not-so-good examples, I asked search engines for ideas. For instance, I entered the keywords like 'sports,' 'fragrance,' 'pet food,' and so on, and looked at the search results and went to each site. I examined the URL to find out whether the site was enabled by either ASP or JSP. It is easy to tell; if the URL has .asp file extension, then the dynamic content is enabled by ASP technology; if the URL has .jsp file extension, it is a JSP page. I only examined the sites built with ASP or JSP. Overall, I found that most famous brand names are designed well, and those not-so-well-designed websites are often not so famous. Maybe it is because famous brand names have more money to go out and find the best Web development companies to build their dream stores. On contrary, small retailers do not have money to hire a better Web development staff nor to outsource the project to a better Web development company. In this research, I did not give quite much description to describe how good a website is; rather, I evaluated websites using the quantitative approach based on Dr. Nathanson's website assessment guidelines. From the final table, which shows the comparison of the six websites in terms of percentile, I found that the numbers are pretty good at describing how good a site is. In addition, I found that good websites usually are good at every aspect, and not-so-good websites are also not so good in every aspect. The conclusion I draw here is that the six key elements are not only playing important roles in the process of Web development, but they also have influence on each other; if one element cannot be well implemented, the other five elements will end up not being well implemented as well. Afterthoughts I strongly recommend that people who want to get into Web development field to learn JSP and XML, because XML will be a major technology to store data in the future, and JSP is currently the technology that best manipulate the data in the XML documents. A lot of web development jobs need the skilled of XML because they want to convert data from different vendors' database into portable XML documents. The significance of such a converting is highlighted because of the fact that the traditional way of storing data has several disadvantages. For instance, we have lots of different database and Web servers from various vendors. Because of this diversity, different bridging mechanisms need to be in the right place to enable a Web server to talk to a database. Moreover, to get data from a database, a Web server needs to know how to speak correctly for database to understand. That is, a Web developer also needs to know database language. All these things have been there for many years. But if we store data in an XML document, the cost of storing data is greatly reduced. And even better is that we now have Java technology that can help a Web developer to manipulate the data within the XML file. XML also will greatly improve the search ability because XML focus on how to store data and how to describe data. Unlike HTML, XML separates the actual data from page layout issue. This would result in more precise search result, and I think this is why XML is becoming a hottie. There are projects that implement an XML search engine going on. This would encourage people to change the way they store data. Currently Java is considered the best technology to process XML documents, so I recommend a Web-developer-wannabe to learn XML and Java. However, does it mean that we can avoid learning to handcraft a HTML page or simply rely on a WYSIWYG HTML editor to do the layout job for use? My answer is no. A WYSIWYG HTML editor such as Macromedia Dreamweaver or Microsoft FrontPage can be used as a helper when we want to see what our HTML code would look like in a Web browser. But there are jobs that FrontPage and or Dreamweaver cannot fulfill. WYSIWYG editors are only good at displaying static HTML; they are not so good at handling the scripting code that would do fancy things, such as rollover images or scrolling texts ˇV at this situation, the editors will just ignore the scripts. And we still have to figure out how the page would look like by interpreting the code by ourselves. Therefore, the knowledge of plain HTML coding is important. Once we are good at hand-coding HTML, we can make better good use of JSP and or ASP to create a both functional and scenic web pages. As mentioned early, JSP and ASP source code is only a combination of static HTML code and dynamic scripting code. The scripts contribute to the functionality requirement of an interactive website. The HTML code contributes to the look and feel of a website. Among the six websites that we have examined, each one of them has the ability to dynamically generate content; however, the look and feel issue makes them look so different. Based on the stats in this paper, the look and feel issue has great influence on how successful they are in their e-commerce business. So, if we have the technology to dynamically generate content plus strong knowledge of HTML, we can make a website that is both functional and good-looking. However, this is not the all for web development; we still have one guy missing: the human factor. According to Dr. Craig Nathanson, a website which can be qualified as a 'place' needs the following six elements: being scenic, functional, self-guiding, flow, familiar, and unique. A place is a website where people would keep coming back to have fun with; a place is a website that does not have enabling technologies, but a website that shows that they do care about and want to know what their visitors want from their site. If we have a fancy interactive website, but we do not show our passion about human, our website would end up being a site stuffed with cold codes and people would not want to come back to us again. Being able to design a website that fully implements these six elements is much harder than learning the programming languages. In this class, we are learning how to implement the six elements. The tremendously invaluable thing we learned in this class is how to evaluate a website based on precise guidelines provided by Dr. Nathanson. It is so precious because we not only know how to evaluate other peopleˇ¦s websites, we also know how to improve our website or how to start to build our place correctly right from the beginning. Before this class, I could name a lot of good websites and bad websites, but I could not describe why I thought they were so. Now we have had Dr. Craig Nathanson's website assessment guidelines, we can quantitatively evaluate how good a website's design is. Such a quantitative approach is an invaluable knowledge to me because I like things to be analyzed scientifically, not just emotionally based on personal preferences. Human factor and technology factor are complement to each other; a 'place' cannot do well without either one.
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