South Shore Product Requirements Document

Document is currently unLOCKED by rebron

Shopping Browser
Code Name: "South Shore"
Product Requirements Document

Last Modified: 01/21/05

Author: Rafael Ebron

I. Revision History

01/21/05 - rebron - initial draft

II. Executive Summary

South Shore is a shopping browser that is built on top of Mozilla technology that will allow users to shop online in a safe environment, as well as provide users with an enhanced shopping user experience. There are several reasons why people don't shop online including: shipping fees (not addressed in this prd), feeling safe/secure, slow connection, slow or bad user experience, or inconsistency of user experience from one shopping site to the next.

South Shore will be built on top of the Mozilla platform which has demonstrated success as platform by the Mozilla Firefox web browser, Thunderbird email client, and other client software forthcoming. Conceptually, South Shore is to shopping online via a browser, as Thunderbird is to reading web mail via a web browser. It's also similar in concept to the Amazon XUL browser and iTunes/Apple Store integration.

Some of the problems that can be solved by a shopping browser include:

Since it's a "restricted" client no opportunity for spoofing i.e. can't enter a shopping site via a URL bar
No ability to spoof dialogs (secure authentication?)
Faster user experience since user interface is mostly client side - only sucks in data and not HTML presentation which is inefficient
Rich sorting of search results, quick find
Allow drag and drop of items to a persistent shopping cart
Allows client side shopping history
Consistent user interface (shopping providers can focus on fufillment and marketing of goods versus HTML presentation of a shopping cart or user flow)

The main business objectives for South Shore are the following:

Drive online web purchases by providing a safe/secure environment
Drive online web purchases by providing a richer user experience, and client-side feature set to shopping
Decrease the problems of anti-scamming/phishing which are costing companies and consumers millions of dollars and more importantly trust with online shopping
Provide an open, back end API (via web services) to allow multiple vendors to plug-in

The target audience for South Shore is beginner to advanced web users who have been online for 1 to 5+ years. These users actively use e-mail, instant messenger, and surf the internet (search/research, browse i.e. news and sports, shop online, and build web pages).

This is a 1.0 product specification. Features for this release include: browser like UI for navigation, XUL based widgets/forms to display data e.g. search results form, wallet, shopping cart, and back-end web services specification. General public availability of South Shore for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux via download is TBD (depending on who builds it first).

III. Related Documents

Name	Version	Description	Pub Date	Location

IV. Definitions, Acronyms, Abbreviations

The following acronyms and terms are used in this plan:

Web Services -
Shopping provider -
XUL -

V. Assumptions, Constraints, and Risks

South Shore will be based on Mozilla/Firefox.
South Shore is standards based.
Integrates with web services pulling only data from the shopping provider.
Most of the UI is client side.
South Shore allows for more than one shopping provider but will be dependent on the vendor, e.g. an Amazon.com branded South Shore browser can have Amazon.com as a store but will decide on inclusion of others.
South Shore is a client application and thus needs to be distributed to users.
Restricted to trusted providers i.e. Amazon.com, Barnes and Nobles, and not mom and pop bad guy spoofer
Requires shopping sites to provide their data via XML/Web services
A Jakob Nielsen usability recommendation is to copy top sites to maintain user experience consistency i.e. flows and look and feel is more or less the same across shopping sites.
South Shore 1.0 is not a music library/player like iTunes. Can only do music previews. Maybe in next version.

VI. Contacts

Name	Organization	Role	Phone	Email

VII. Target Audience

South Shore is intended to appeal to a broad audience of individual Internet users, who access the Internet from work or home. Typical target customers include:

Everybody online to make this section easy.

South Shore is not intended to target the following users:

People who aren't online (duh)

VIII. Requirements

Priority legend:
P1 = not a product without this feature (either architecture based or stop ship without this feature)
P2 = must have feature; great benefit to end user with major business impact
P3 = want this feature, but can ship without
P4 = keep this in mind for the next release

Feature Status Options:
In = feature is planned for the release and staffed
Out = feature not planned for this release
Done = feature completed

Section A. General
Item Number	Feature	Priority	Status	Eng. Assigned	QA Assigned/ Test Plan
A.1	Navigation UI Must have a Back, Forward, Path bar (shows current location but not editable), Home button, Search field. May have buttons or lists of available stores.
A.2	Status UI Must be able to display current status via progress meter and display actions such as connecting to server. Can be progress meter in a status bar as well as a throbber like image.
A.3	Authentication/Registration Display button on UI to show authentication status (logged in or not) and allow users to log in
A.4	Home Form Main page of the store. Promotional and can have similar to look and feel of existing homepages like Amazon.com or AOL.com shopping site. Can be HTML served from a restricted set of urls.
A.5	Sidebar Tree list of available views/actions e.g. List of available stores, link to Wallet, Wishlists, Saved Searches, Shopping Cart, Shopping history/past x transactions
A.6	Search Results Form Must be able to display content in a list by variable e.g. name of item, price, ability to sort content by column, must be able to drag and drop columns, must be able to add/hide columns based on available data. Integrate "add to shopping" cart option. Integrate "add to wishlist" option.
A.7	Column/Category Form Must have
A.8	Product Details Form
A.9	Shopping History
A.10	Wallet/Profile
A.11	Multimedia Support/Plug-in Integration Must have ability to play .mp3 files, videos, and Flash based content (ship Flash, RealPlayer?)
A.12	Carousel Widget
A.13
A.14
A.15
A.16	Chat support Chat with other shoppers, shopping bot, or live customer service forum?
A.17	RSS Feed Don't know yet but RSS is sexy so putting in a placeholder. Conceptually, broadcasting a change to wishlist or broadcasting that an event is coming up like birthday or graduation.
A.18	Help Viewer/Content

Section B. Top OUT Features / Feature Extensions and Why
Item Number	Feature / Extension	Justification

IX. Functional Requirements

D. Supported Platforms


Supported Platforms
Windows	Operating Systems	Windows 98, 98SE, Windows ME, Windows 2000, Windows XP
	Primary OS	Windows XP, Windows 2000
	Tier 2	Windows 98, 98SE, NT
	Minimum Hardware	233 MHz 64 MB RAM 26 MB hard drive space
	Target Hardware	300 MHz 256 MB RAM
Mac	Operating System	Mac OS X 10 or greater (10.2.x recommended)
	Primary OS	Mac OS X 10.2.3
	Tier 2	< Mac OS X 10.1.5
	Minimum Hardware	PowerPC 266 MHz or faster processor G3, or G4 64 MB RAM 36 MB hard drive space
	Target Hardware	G3 300 MHz 128 MB RAM
Unix	Operating System	Linux kernel-2.2.14 or greater, with the following libraries or package minimums: glibc - 2.2.4 gtk+ - 1.2.0 (1.2.5 or greater preferred) XFree86-3.3.6 Supported Platforms: RedHat Linux 7.0 or greater.
	Primary OS	RedHat Linux 8.0
	Tier 2	RedHat Linux <8.0
	Minimum Hardware	233 MHz 64 MB RAM 26 MB hard drive space
	Target Hardware	300 MHz 128 MB RAM

E. Other System Requirements

Minimum monitor resolution: 800x600 with 256 colors
Minimum modem speed: 28.8KB/sec.

F. Unsupported Platforms

Windows 95
Mac OS 9 (and 9.x versions) and lower
Debian, Slackware, SuSE, Caldera, and other Linux distributions that meet the above requirements are not supported.

G. Bundling/Install Requirements

Section L. International Features

Item Number

Feature

Priority

Status

Eng. Assigned

QA Assigned/ Test Plan

L.1

Section M: Localization Requirements

Section M. Localization Plans
Item Number	Country/Language/Platform	Priority	Status	Eng. Assigned	QA Assigned/ Test Plan	Sponsor/Contact
M.1	Japan/Japanese/Windows MacOS Linux	P1
M.2	Germany/German/Windows	P1
M.3	France/French/Windows	P1
M.4	Latin America Mexico/Spanish/TBD	P2

XIII. Deployment Plan

TBD

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