Proven Portals: Best Practices for Planning, Designing, and Developing Enterprise Portals

Ease of Use

Ease of use is a central feature of portals in general, but a few techniques are commonly found in effective customer-facing portals:

• Personalization for commerce

• Intuitive navigation

• Rapid transaction execution

Each of these is discussed in the sections below.

Personalization for Commerce

We want to be remembered where we shop. We should not have to describe our interests and tastes every time we physically visit a frequented shop, and now we expect the same of Web sites. Amazon.com has perhaps been the dominant business in shaping our expectations about personalization.

There are two types of information gathered for personalization: interests and transactions. Personalizing according to your interests is often done implicitly based ...