A business-process-driven approach for generating E-commerce user interfaces

Abstract

A business process contains a set of interdependent activities that describe operations provided by an organization. E-commerce applications are designed to automate business processes. A business process specification (i.e., a workflow) is defined by a business analyst from the viewpoint of the end-users. The process encapsulates the knowledge related to the natural work rhythms that a business user would follow when using an e-commerce application. In this paper, we analyze the information embedded in business process specifications, and infer the functional and usability requirements. We use the inferred information in a model-driven approach to automatically generate user interfaces (UIs) from a business process specification through a set of transformations. To improve the usability of UIs for the e-commerce applications, each transformation is guided by usability principles. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.