Designing the Shopping Basket
| Introduction. I'm
assuming that everyone has made use of a shopping basket on the
web. If you haven't, you should go to some place like Amazon.com
or BarnesandNoble.com and either place an order or make up an order and
not place it. This process should acquaint you with the major
features we want to develop.
In general, there are five major functions we want to have in our shopping basket. They are listed in the following table. |
| Function | Description |
| Add items | When a shopper is on a product page and hits the order button, something needs to happen to add the product to the basket. There are almost surely going to be some important business rules to keep in mind. |
| Display basket | When the user actually enters the shopping basket page they need to see the items they have added to their basket and quantities and certain important attributes. |
| Update items | If the user wants to change the quantity of the item this needs to be easy. This option can get even more elaborate if changing attributes is important. |
| Remove items | If the user wants to remove a particular item this needs to be possible. Not that we all haven't visited webs where this was for some reason very difficult! |
| Empty basket | If the user decides they want to dump the whole thing we need to provide a way for them to do this. |
| The following diagram gives a representation of some of these operations. |