Design Principles

From the statements of our interview candidates we derived the following design principles:

• A free or at least cheap use of the system seems to be the most important feature, since this was requested by all three interview candidates. As a consequence, the setup of iTrades's communication section has to be configured in a way that it tries to connect to the trade partner using the most cheapest available communication technique, starting with the iTrade communication protocol, which is free, over Short Message Service and E-Mail, to phone calls, which would probably be the most expensive variant.
• The number of categories should be kept small and flat. If the number is to high, there probably would be many empty categories. This increases search times and may be frustrating for the user, which also could be true for a too deep-structured category hierarchy.
• All users stated, that they would rather use the passive search, than the active browse feature. Facing the short time, available for application development, we will focus on this preferred search section.