The role of usability in mobile commerce

This paper reports a study on the usability of e-commerce accessed through smartphones. There is much research in the usability of mobile interfaces and many sets of design patterns have been created but a few studies are available for specific domains, and in this report we focus on mobile e-commerce. In this study a framework is developed for how to design mobile e-commerce interfaces with a high degree of usability. Furthermore, the study also contributes a method to how other specific domain can develop a framework with general standards to work from when creating a web interface. By examining two sets of design principles and 14 design patterns, we evaluate which ones are critical in the design of a mobile e-commerce interface for achieving a high degree of usability. We have done this by applying the survey in two e-commerce sites with different design approaches to examine how they relate to the selected design patterns and design principles. The survey is conducted in three phases through an online survey, a content analysis and an observational study to investigate the interface usability based on theoretical- and practical perspectives. The study shows that in order to create a good usability of e-commerce sites accessed through smartphones, the user want to recognize themselves in how the content is presented and communicated, as well as the interface should obtain certain key functions