University Report: ICT 504 Ecommerce Application Interface Usability

This report focuses on the development of an e-commerce application interface, aiming to assist users in ordering products and managing their orders. The report explores design principles, targeted user analysis, and usability goals to ensure a user-friendly interface. It includes a discussion of the design principles, such as context, structure, simplicity, and feedback, and their application in the interface design. The report analyzes the usability goals, including learnability, efficiency, effectiveness, and user satisfaction, alongside an examination of positive and negative influences on the interface's design. Recommendations are provided to improve the structure, simplicity, and visibility of the interface, ensuring a seamless user experience. The conclusion summarizes the importance of these design principles in creating a successful and user-friendly application, emphasizing the significance of usability evaluation and user satisfaction.

Running head: ICT 504 INTERFACE USABILITY
ICT 504 Interface Usability
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author’s Note

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ICT 504 INTERFACE USABILITY
Table of Contents
Introduction......................................................................................................................................2
Targeted Users.................................................................................................................................2
Design Principles.............................................................................................................................2
Usability goals.................................................................................................................................4
User Experience Goals....................................................................................................................5
Positive and Negative Influences.....................................................................................................6
Reason behind recommendations....................................................................................................7
Conclusion.......................................................................................................................................7
References........................................................................................................................................9

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ICT 504 INTERFACE USABILITY
Introduction
The report is prepared for development of an ecommerce application interface design that
would help the user to order new product from the store and manage their orders. The basic
functionality of the application to place order and provide suggestion to the user about similar
product in the best price. A research is done on the design principle and targeted users are
selected for preparation of the report. The usability of the application is analyzed by comparing it
with the usability goals and the positive and negative influence of the application interface such
that it meets the user requirement.
Targeted Users
For performing the usability testing the main targeted group of users are the online users
who currently uses different platform and device for purchasing items and compare the prices of
the product on different website for getting the best deal. The methodology for perceiving the
task by the targeted user and their views for reaching the desired goals is evaluated for the
identification of user errors (Laakso et al., 2016). A group of friendly users are included for
testing the usability and analysis of the purpose of communication and tradeoffs for reaching the
goals and objectives.
Design Principles
The design principles are followed for the improvement of the user interface design and a
user centered design is used for the development of the user interface. The following are the
design principles for the development of interface:
Component Comment Design Principle

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ICT 504 INTERFACE USABILITY
Context Driving Question
Sub Questions
Anchoring Events
Defined problem space that
are meaningful and causing
intellectual challenge
Standard Base AAAS Benchmark
Benchmark Lessons
National standards
Large community expert
publication and defining
language and method
Inquiry Data collection, organization
and analysis
Communicating and sharing
data (Burns & Hajdukiewicz,
2017)
Problem solving acceptance
method and identifying the
set of interrelated process
Collaboration Design meeting with small
groups
Group presentation
Share learning strategy
Community member, teacher
and student for sharing
information
Structure improvement The design is needed to be
organized in a meaningful
way depending on consistent
and clear models that is
needed to be apparent and can
be recognized by the users
(Shneiderman et al., 2016).
Structure Principle
Simplicity Simple design interface Simplicity Principle

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ICT 504 INTERFACE USABILITY
Visibility Visible options Visibility Principle
Feedback Take user feedback Feedback Principle
Tolerance Option for redo or edit
information
Tolerance Principle
Reuse The internal and external
components are needed to be
reused for maintaining
consistency and reducing the
user needs for rethinking or
remembering the actions
(Yamamoto et al., 2015).
Reuse Principles
Usability goals
The main goals of the usability are given below:
Components Comment Usability goals
Learnability Ability to learn easily Learnability
Efficiency Ability to save time Efficiency
Effectiveness Achievement of user goals Effectiveness
Scale A simple scale for usability
assessment
Usability scale
User Satisfaction Overall feelings about the
system
User satisfaction

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ICT 504 INTERFACE USABILITY
Ease of access Maintaining simplicity of the
interface
Ease of access
Consistency Use of short description and
relevant images
Consistency
Error Tolerance Options for correcting the
errors
Error Tolerance
Reliability Security of information and
use of encryption
Reliability
Response The response time is needed
to be minimum
Response
User Experience Goals
The main goals of the usability are given below:
Components Comment Usability goals
Learnability Ability to learn easily Learnability
Efficiency Ability to save time Efficiency
Effectiveness Achievement of user goals Effectiveness
Scale A simple scale for usability
assessment
Usability scale
User Satisfaction Overall feelings about the
system
User satisfaction
Ease of access Maintaining simplicity of the
interface
Ease of access

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ICT 504 INTERFACE USABILITY
Consistency Use of short description and
relevant images
Consistency
Error Tolerance Options for correcting the
errors
Error Tolerance
Reliability Security of information and
use of encryption
Reliability
Response The response time is needed
to be minimum
Response
Positive and Negative Influences
The development of the interface has some positive and negative influence on the interface and
they are given below:
Positive influence – It helps in actively involve the user in the development process and
make eliminate the error in the development process for validating inputs and result in aligning
the interface design following the user needs (Louridas, Tsoukalas & Mitropoulos, 2016). The
simplicity of the design would attract more number of user and help them to get the price of the
similar item from a single platform without the need to search price from different platform.
Negative Influence – It can increase the complexity of the designer to integrate the
functional module. Combining the result of different website can increase the response time and
thus the user may feel dissatisfied for using this functionality (Vance, Lowry & Eggett, 2015).

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ICT 504 INTERFACE USABILITY
Reason behind recommendations
The following are the recommendation between the recommendations for the development of the
app.
The structure can be improved by keeping the related things together and separating the
unrelated things. It is concerned with the user interface architecture.
The design is needed to be kept simple and have similar interface with most of the
ecommerce applications. Shortcuts is needed to be available such that longer procedures can be
avoided.
The options that are essential in needed to be visible and the interface design should not
distract the user with redundant information.
The users are needed to be kept informed about the actions, change of state, errors
exceptions. Clear and unambiguous language is needed to be used for creating concise and clear
perception.
A flexible design is needed to be created and the mistakes are needed to be reduced. The
users are needed to be provided the undo options for preventing errors and validating the inputs
for the interpretation of the reasonable actions.
Conclusion
The report is prepared for discussing the importance of principles of design that are
needed for the development of a user interface design. The usability is evaluated for analyzing
the satisfaction level of the user and gathering information using different methodology about the
existing project and create a plan for the new application development. The usability comprises

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ICT 504 INTERFACE USABILITY
of different factors such as intuitive design, ease of learning, efficiency of usage, memorability,
frequency of error and subjective satisfaction. For the evaluation of the usability of the
application is essential to identify the targeted group of user, design principle followed for
designing the interface, goals of the usability and positive or negative influence of the proposed
design.

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ICT 504 INTERFACE USABILITY
References
Burns, C. M., & Hajdukiewicz, J. (2017). Ecological interface design. CRC Press.
Laakso, K. P., Husu, T., Romppainen, M., Fagerlund, J., Kettunen, M., & Standell, T. (2016,
May). User Interface Design In Agile Projects. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI
Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1007-
1010). ACM.
Louridas, P., Tsoukalas, G., & Mitropoulos, D. (2016). Requirements and User Interface Design.
Shneiderman, B., Plaisant, C., Cohen, M., Jacobs, S., Elmqvist, N., & Diakopoulos, N.
(2016). Designing the user interface: strategies for effective human-computer interaction.
Pearson.
Vance, A., Lowry, P. B., & Eggett, D. L. (2015). Increasing accountability through the user
interface design artifacts: A new approach to addressing the problem of access-policy
violations. Mis Quarterly, 39(2), 345-366.
Yamamoto, G., Hyry, J., Krichenbauer, M., Taketomi, T., Sandor, C., Kato, H., & Pulli, P.
(2015, March). A user interface design for the elderly using a projection tabletop system.
In 2015 3rd IEEE VR International Workshop on Virtual and Augmented Assistive
Technology (VAAT) (pp. 29-32). IEEE.