Website developers need to consider a range of usability factors when designing a website.
A company promotes its products online. To make a purchase, customers are required to register with the company and provide data like their:
- name
- date of birth
- age
- gender
- email address
Once registered, more than one customer is able to access the server to retrieve and modify their data at the same time.
State where the customer data is held during the process of modifying their data.
Customer data is held in RAM/primary memory during the process of modifying their data.
Common Mistake
The company is considering sharing its customers’ data with marketing organizations.
Explain why there could be ethical issues for the company when sharing its customers’ data.
Ethical Issues for Sharing Customer Data
- Privacy of customer/personal data
1 mark - Company needs to gain permission from customer
1 mark - Customer would need to be able to view all data details
1 mark - Customer must be informed about all uses that will be made of data
1 mark - Customer must be informed to whom data will be disclosed
1 mark - Legal issues related to unauthorized disclosure of customer data
1 mark
Explain how the operating system ensures that each customer’s data is secure when multiple users are accessing the data at the same time.
- The OS (memory management function) allocates/deallocates memory to each process/customer task, and guarantees each customer task the resources it needs to run correctly
1 mark - It moves processes back and forth between main memory and secondary memory during execution to prevent overwriting/accidental interchange
1 mark - The OS (hardware memory protection - part of an OS) isolates/protects customers' data/applications
1 mark - It controls access rights to the specified memory area (for example, prevents write access to the memory which is not allocated to the process/customer task)
1 mark - It protects data/applications when in memory/RAM from malicious code (prevents attempts to execute the contents of the partition/allocated memory)
1 mark
Note
Identify two usability factors that need to be considered in the design of a website.
Outline one reason why visual displays on a computer screen can create difficulties for some people.
