Local Farm Shop Application: A User-Friendly Interface Design

This report presents the design and development of the Local Farm Shop application, a user-friendly platform offering food, drinks, gifts, and restaurant services. The design process involved two alternative designs, user feedback collection, and implementation of Nielsen heuristic principles for optimal usability. The application features a user-friendly interface, secure login/signup, and various payment options. The report also discusses the similarities and differences between Local Farm Shop and a similar application, FarmShop LLC.

Abstract
The Local Farm Shop Application is designed to provide the facilities of foods, drinks, gifts, and
restaurant to customers. The wireframes of the application design in Balsamiq tool where all the
functionality of the applications is clearly mentioned. There are four different phases in Local farm
Application. First phase includes the presentation of design in two different alternative design. The
second phase includes the description of selective alternative design of Local farm Application. After
selection of alternative design start to designing the interface followed by documentation. The third phase
includes collecting feedback from other group members. And the fourth phase includes application
designing and then improves the design according to feedback. The Nielsen heuristic principles were used
for designing the interface for the application. After analyzing the feedbacks, interface designs are
improved. After final design, a final documentation is created for Local farm Shop application. The
design prototype can be used by any customer without having any knowledge of using the application.
Improvements can be done like history page can be added which will contain information of past orders
of customer. It will help the customer to know their past order details.
Introduction
The Local farm Shop application is designed to provide the facilities of foods, drinks, gifts, and restaurant
to customers. There are different features in the application Local farm Shop like login page, sign-up
page, menu option and many more. There is log out button on each screen of interface if user gets stuck
somewhere he can exit from application. The sign up allows new user to register for Local farm Shop
application. The menu option includes three categories of application like drinks, food, gifts, and
restaurant. Back-button functionality is also present on each screen which provides facility to customer to
navigate between the screens (Charland & Leroux 2011).
For developing the Local farm Shop application, Nielsen Heuristic principles are used for developing the
interface screen. The principles include the functionality like designing of back button, search button. The
heuristic principles used are help and documentation, visibility of system status, diagnose, flexibility and
efficiency of use. These heuristic principles are applied in Local farm Shop application.
There is a unique functionality applied in Local farm Shop application that application can get the
feedback from user. The application will also generate an error if some information is inserted in
application is wrong. The feedbacks are resolved which help to make the application better. There is also
a confirmation message occur when user clicks on buy option (Hackos & Redish 1998).

Reflection of Local farm Shop application
User interface design
The Local Farm Shop Application is designed to help the customers to provide different features
like drinks, food, gifts, and restaurant. The application provides the functionality to user to book
the restaurant, buy food items, drink items and gift items. The user can pay for the items which he
wishes to purchase. The user can book the restaurant by seeing the facilities provided by the
restaurant. The user needs to first sign in in the application and then he can use the services
provided by Local Farm Shop Application.
The application design follows all the Nielsen heuristic model principles and the interface screen
are user-friendly and design is attractive (Miraz, Excell & Ali, 2014).
User requirement
The application Local farm Shop is designed according to user requirement the design of
application is very interactive and provide all the necessary features. The application features are
clearly visible and the background color used is also very attractive and use according to
application type. The application is very secure as it provides functionality to user that without
sign-in or sign-up user can’t use the services offered by Local farm Shop application. According
to user, requirement contains various features of Local Farm Shop (Jia & Capretz, 2017).
Justification for Local Farm Shop application design
The application local Farm Shop application is designed to help the customers to provide
different features like drinks, food, gifts, and restaurant. The user sign-in or sign-up in the
application and can select the items which he wishes to purchase. There are different unique
features like the application not allow the users which are not user of application. There is various
payment option in option user can pay using credit card, debit card or by cash on delivery. The
application helps user to easily buy the grocery items like various drinks, food, items or gift
items. For making the application easy, the Nielsen Heuristic principles are used in Local Farm
Shop application. The usability principles provide various unique features to an application like
back button functionality, log out button functionality and menu item functionality (Fernandes
1995).
Factors for application designing
For designing the Local Farm Shop application, the factors which are undertaken are user
requirements, restrictions and business requirements and the design principle used are Nielsen
heuristic principle. The user requirement for application is to use appropriate font and
background color for the application. According to user, the requirement is to use proper font,
buttons, and label. The application features should be easily accessible and any type of users like
new user or existing user can easily use the application without facing any problem. The unique
features help to make the application attractive, easy and help the user to buy the items using the
Local Farm Shop application (Mayhew, 1999). For using the application, the user has to first log
in the application and then purchase the items from the application. For making the application
attractive, the different heuristic principles are used like Aesthetic and minimalist design, help
and documentation, helps user recognize, diagnose, visibility of system status and many

more. These heuristic principles help to easily design the Local Farm Shop application
attractive to all the users.
Discussion of similar Local Farm Shop interface
The name of the application which is similar to Local Farm Shop application is FarmShop LLC
application. The features similar in both applications are both applications is design to provide grocery
items to customer. Customers can easily buy the products using both applications. Other features similar
in both applications are when booking the restaurant the details need to be submitted are almost similar.
Local Farm Shop application is better in some manner like it provide facility of gift items to customer. I
have also provides a facility that without sign in application user can’t access the services offered by
application.
In some cases, Local Farm Shop application is weaker than FarmShop LLC application. The interface
design of FarmShop LLC application is better than Local Farm Shop application. There is also a facility
of calendar in the FarmShop LLC application.
Similar Local Farm Shop interface: http://farmshopllc.com/services/
Conclusion
In this last assignment, a complete interface design summary is created which discuss features
and functionality of application Local Farm Shop. In this assignment, a proper discussion is
carried out for a similar type of application FarmShop which provides similar functionality which
is provided by Local Farm Shop application. The report presents the final design of the
application local Farm Shop application which is altered after collecting feedback from another
group member in phase 3. The report briefly discussed system requirements, user requirements,
restrictions and the design principles and also discussed the Nielsen heuristic model principles.

References
 Cahill, J., Geary, U., Douglas, E., Wilson, S., Ferreira, M., & Gilbert, B. (2018). User and design
requirements and production of evidence: using incident analysis data to (1) inform user scenarios
and bow ties, and (2) generate user and design requirements. Cognition, Technology & Work,
20(1), 23-47. doi: 10.1007/s10111-017-0457-8.
 Miraz, M., Excell, P., & Ali, M. (2014). User interface (UI) design issues for multilingual users: a
case study. Universal Access In The Information Society, 15(3), 431-444. doi: 10.1007/s10209-
014-0397-5.
 Charland, A., & Leroux, B. (2011). Mobile application development: web vs.
native. Communications of the ACM, 54(5), 49-53.
 Hackos, J. T., & Redish, J. (1998). User and task analysis for interface design.
 Mayhew, D. J. (1999). The usability engineering lifecycle. In CHI'99 Extended Abstracts on
Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 147-148). ACM.
 Fernandes, T. (1995). Global interface design: A guide to designing international user interfaces.

Appendix
Figure 1 Welcome screen
Figure 2 Signup screen
Login and sign up
option in welcome
screen.

Figure 3 Sign-in screen
Figure 4 Home screen
Different features offered
by Local Farm Shop
Application

Figure 5 FarmShop LLC application interface
Figure 6 Local Farm Shop application interface