Research On User-centered Exhibition Website Development

Exhibition industry is of great importance in the 21st century .It not only benefits many other industries such as traffic, tourism, business and the food industry ,but also becomes a pillar industry in the local economy. Since 1990s, a new round of scientific and technological revolution centering on information technology has made the whole world a village. The international exhibition industry is developing in the intelligence and informationization direction with improved network technology and electronic commerce.The center of digital exhibition is interactive exhibition web-platform. The Union des Foires Internationales proposed that the whole process of exhibition should be organized by a multifunctional web-platform on the basis of Intranet, Extranet and Internet. Exhibition website is the bridge of information system and the customers. According to the scale and special needs of the real exhibition, an exhibition website should combine all the functional parts within one site. Meanwhile, it should harmonize the needs of organizer, exhibitors and visitors. These special characteristics of exhibition website have bring a great challenge to its design work. The paper starts from discuss the current flaw of the design and design procedure of the exhibition website, pointing out the necessary of carry out this research. The second part of this paper analyses the special characteristics of exhibition website and the necessary of user study aiming at exhibition website design. The third part of the paper mainly discusses how to combine user study with website design, and put forward the user centered method of exhibition website design. The last part is a case study, which show how the user center design methods works and what change it makes.