Conceptual Design and Usability Evaluation of a Grid Utility SECOnD Portal for Under-Resourced Business Enterprises in Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

Conventional grid-enabled portal designs have been primarily based on the usual traditional requirements specifications such as security requirements, grid resource requirements, job management requirements and the likes. However, the pay-as-you-use service provisioning model of utility computing platforms need to consider and satisfy certain salient requirements considered relevant in a bid to achieve better conceptual designs of Service-based Electronic Commerce On-Demand (SECOnD) that are well-usable for grid utility platforms such as the Grid-based Utility Infrastructure for Small, Micro, and Medium Enterprises (SMME) Enabling Technology (GUISET). The work aspect profiled in paper entails the conceptual design and usability evaluation of a SECOnD portal which serves as the uniform channel through which targeted under-resourced SMMEs can inexpensively access and use e-Commerce technologies and tools without owning them. The outcome of the evaluation experiment revealed that the service portal designed largely achieve the usability expectations of it users.