As with all other aspects of CRS-M, its UX design is intended as an example of how to approach the UX design of a mobile site. It can be customized or adapted to meet specific business needs.

Much thought and effort has been invested in the UX design of CRS-M. Some of the most important goals included:

In order to achieve these goals, many aspects of the shopping experience were revisited and many design principles were adapted to apply specifically to the mobile environment. During the UX design process, the following traits emerged as desirable for mobile UIs:

Simple

It was found that the task of simplifying a desktop UI for use on a mobile device was relatively easy up to a point, but realizing this goal to the point that user expectations were met required significant additional effort. In the mobile environment where space is limited, every task has to be sufficiently clear so that task-specific instructions are not necessary.

Several aspects of the CRS-M UI and underlying architecture are designed with speed in mind. These are discussed in each section as applicable and specifically in the section entitled Performance Considerations.

Utilitarian

CRS-M’s design is currently search-driven rather than browse-driven. Furthermore, the search process aims to reduce the number of server roundtrips in order to speed up this process.

The “refine” process allows the user to refine their search results, while the facets that are used to perform this refinement provide users with the opportunity to see how the catalog is organized. The search and refinement process is discussed in detail in the section Oracle Endeca Commerce driven Search and Browse.

Also a utilitarian trait, CRS-M aims to keep the number of form fields to a minimum in order to reduce the amount of manual input required by users. Required fields are not explicitly flagged, as all fields displayed are in fact required. This eliminates the need for the user to distinguish between required and optional fields.

It is worth noting that making a UI more utilitarian does not necessarily mean adding more powerful features, but rather may mean removing anything that is not directly useful to the user in order to complete the task at hand.

User-Centric

In the case of CRS-M, user centricity was interpreted as the need to make the process of purchasing an item using CRS-M as simple as possible. This is particularly evident in the checkout flow of the application, where checkout is significantly expedited for logged-in users. User centricity also drove the provision of clear decision points, more pre-populated fields and fewer input fields where possible.

Different from Desktop

Desktop and mobile UIs differ not only in their dimensions but also in the physical environments in which users interact with them. Desktop UIs are typically interacted with from a laptop or desktop computer, which by nature implies a stationary physical location. Mobile UIs by their nature can be interacted with in a variety of physical locations (as discussed in the “Simple” section).

Desktop UI paradigms do not always apply directly to touchscreen devices. Since CRS-M’s UI is targeted at touchscreen devices, its UI takes advantage of this more discovery-centric environment, that is, gestures are familiar to users of touchscreen devices and those users readily experiment with gestures. Therefore the CRS-M design relies more on swiping than it does on traditional buttons with instructions as the means to explore and interact with the UI. To this end, CRS-M’s UI uses horizontal touch sliders and touch-responsive page areas as well as traditional vertically scrolling pages.