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EXPLORING THE TOTAL CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE: USABILITY EVALUATIONS OF (B2C) E-COMMERCE ENVIRONMENTS Call for Position Papers (deadline Tuesday, 2nd July 2003) One day workshop at INTERACT 2003: Ninth IFIP TC13 International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction http://www.interact2003.org/ Zürich, Switzerland, September 2, 2003 Organisers: Shailey Minocha and Liisa Dawson Workshop Web site: http://computing.open.ac.uk/interact2003 You are invited to participate in an interactive, participatory Workshop, focussing on techniques for evaluating business to consumer (B2C) E-Commerce Environments. Background: An E-Commerce environment implies not only the front-end of the E-Commerce, which is the Web site, but also constitutes the back-office and customer support systems. We use the term Total Customer Experience (TCE) to encapsulate the customer's experience of interacting with an E-Commerce environment. With increasing competition in the E-marketplace, creating value and generating a positive TCE is important for E-Commerce environments in order to attract and retain customers. Traditional usability evaluation techniques in HCI such as heuristic evaluations and controlled user-observations yield usability problems with the E-Commerce Web site but are unable to uncover factors that mar a customer's TCE. In this workshop, our aim is to assess the current state of usability evaluation techniques and propose a toolbox of evaluation techniques adapted from HCI and other domains such as social psychology, consumer behavioural analysis and marketing that can be used to assess and promote a positive TCE. This workshop will allow those working in the area of (B2C) E-Commerce environments, either as Web designers, usability engineers, or academics, to engage in a practically oriented environment and address a range of issues determining effective design and evaluation of E-Commerce environments. Organisers: The workshop is being organised by colleagues from the Open University (OU), UK who are involved in a Research Programme in the area of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Service Quality of E-Commerce Environments at the OU. This research programme in CRM is currently being supported by EPSRC and the Research Development Fund of the OU. Both the organisers have commercial and academic experience in this area. How to take part: We invite position papers on the workshop theme, outlining current involvement in the field, experiences and novel ideas for evaluating (B2C) E-Commerce environments. For usability professionals, this could briefly document challenges and solutions derived from previous projects and / or personal views of techniques for effective evaluations. For academics this could be a summary of individual research within this field. Position papers should be no longer than 2 pages (approximately 1000 words) presented in the conference format and emailed in PDF to Shailey Minocha [log in to unmask]) by 2nd July 2003. The organisers will confirm participation by 16th July 2003. More information about the workshop is available at the workshop website: http://computing.open.ac.uk/interact2003