Designing an e-grocery application for a Palm computer: Usability and interface issues

Abstract

The coming ubiquity of handheld devices and e-commerce will offer many new design and application opportunities for human-computer interaction, many of them in "everyday" domains. This article reports on the iterative design of a handheld application for one such domain, grocery shopping. Our goal was to produce a solution for home ordering of groceries using a PDA. The article focuses on the evolution of the application design through a process that alternated design activities with formative evaluations in the field. At the end of the design and development process, 200 shoppers in the United Kingdom were using the resulting application.