Web Commerce Security Design and Development

Usability

Usability refers to the ease of interaction between users and computing platforms and systems. Acceptable usability is important to reduce errors but also to support security controls.

Jakob Nielsen, who has written extensively on usability, defines the term as “a quality attribute that assesses how easy user interfaces are to use. The word ‘usability’ also refers to methods for improving ease-of-use during the design process.”¹⁰ Nielsen also defines the following usability attributes:

• Learnability
• Efficiency
• Memorability
• Errors
• Satisfaction

User interfaces in Web commerce applications should be “usable” in that the customer can navigate the required fields and pages efficiently and with ease without a difficult learning process and without making errors. Also, security controls should be usable in that they should be easy to set up, apply, use, and modify. If they are difficult to employ, they probably will not be adopted and, in many cases, might be circumvented. They should also not degrade the system performance.