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140 PROTOTYPINGat hand is typically more important than sophisticated
graphic design. The text should be optimized for scanning,
not reading; short text segments, hyperlinks, and bulleted
lists will allow the user to scan the current page quickly
and determine his or her next action (Nielsen, 2000). The
content must also meet the goals of the application. If the
system is designed to support online sales of a particular
product line, then the relevant content for each product
should be available. Although prototype systems typically
focus on determining the look and feel of a site via graphic
design, it is clear that content should also be reviewed to
ensure that it is optimized for usability.
In cases where multilingual or multicultural content is
required, an additional set of criteria must be considered:Translation of content. If the site or application is in-
tended for global access, then it might be necessary
to provide site content in more than one language. If
this requirement is adopted, then for each language
to be supported the system design must consider (a)
which version or dialect to support, (b) which char-
acter sets to use, (c) which font encoding to use, and
(d) how to provide text, graphics, and HTML in that
language (O’Connor, 2001). Most translation work is
handled by selection of an appropriate service bureau.
It is useful to construct a multilingual prototype sys-
tem, as this affords an opportunity to evaluate the qual-
ity of service provided by potential translations ven-
dors. A prototype can also be evaluated for how well
the site or application presents multilingual content to
the end user; the selection of a language at run-time
should be easy (or automatic). Sites such as Google
(http://www.google.com) predict the desired language
from the IP address of the Web browser when it con-
tacts the site and redirect the HTTP request to an ap-
propriate language server. Emerging standards such
as Unicode provide a standardized way of encoding
Web pages for multiple languages and character sets
(Unicode Consortium, 2002).
Localization of content. Preparing content for a different
language often implies preparing it for a different cul-
ture.Localizationis the process that adjusts the trans-
lated material to fit the targeted culture. Simple forms
of localization include changing the page layout to fit
the translated material; because translated material
can vary in length, the original layout may no longer
be appropriate. More sophisticated forms of localiza-
tion involve checking for culturally inappropriate use
of graphics or other visual cues (for example, the use of
a black border is typically reserved for death notices in
the Japanese culture; use of a black border might be in-
appropriate in most other contexts). It is also possible
that localized versions of a site, application, or service
might differ in basic content or scope of service; not all
information and/or functionalities may be available in
all markets. Building and evaluating a prototype sys-
tem is an excellent way to determine the exact nature
of the localization requirements for a particular global
market.
Infrastructure support. Typical e-commerce Web sites
include various navigation mechanisms, applicationservers, back-end databases, external servers and ser-
vices, etc. All of these layers in the computing infras-
tructure must be considered in designing a site for the
global market. If a decision is made to translate and
localize content and services, then the corresponding
components in the infrastructure (product database,
order fulfillment, etc.) must also be translated and/or
localized. A Web site that provides product informa-
tion in several languages but provides only a single lan-
guage for check-out is not responsive to its customer
base. It is much better to catch this type of oversight in
a prototyping evaluation than to have it discovered by
customers online.
Content maintenance. Although it is a challenge to launch
a multilingual site, the ongoing cost of maintaining
a site in multiple languages can also be significant.
It is useful to identify, prototype, and evaluate a pro-
cess for content update before a site “goes live.” Ide-
ally, translated content will be available as soon as
primary content has been updated, but this can be
difficult to achieve if the organization relies on out-
sourcing for translation and localization. Although au-
tomatic translation tools can be useful as human aids,
the state of the art is still not quite good enough to be
relied upon without human intervention, except in very
narrow information domains. In addition, the tools
used for page creation and overall site maintenance
must be able to support multilingual content. Soft-
ware that keeps track of the relationships between pri-
mary content pages and their translated equivalents is a
must.As it is typically very costly to create and provide con-
tent in multiple languages, it is important to ensure that
the design of the site or application is sound before it
is scaled up to include all target languages and markets.
Prototyping can be an excellent way of creating and eval-
uating a design for multilingual content delivery, before
full-scale development begins.Architecture Prototypes
E-commerce architectures typically involve multitier inte-
gration of browsers, applets, servlets, application servers,
and back-end services (databases, credit transactions,
etc.). Most of the complexity (and most of the difficulty) in
e-commerce development is associated with the integra-
tion and testing of the various components in the archi-
tecture. Even before the full content for the application
has been prepared, it is useful to build a prototype imple-
mentation of the end-to-end system. As mentioned above,
architectural prototyping can serve as the basis for a va-
riety of tests, including the following:Integration Testing. Do all of the components commu-
nicate as expected? A Web application typically re-
lies on different Web browsers communicating with
a Web server and/or application server; these in turn
communicate with various back-end services (prod-
uct database, order database, etc.). It is important to
test assumptions regarding the connectivity of the cho-
sen software and hardware for the project, as early as