Cawfee Tawk Application— Usability Engineering Life Cycle

Cawfee Tawk is a mobile application that a Sri Lankan software company developed as per the request of a renowned local coffee shop. I am currently working on this project as a part of the design team.

In this article, I am willing to share how our company adopts the usability life cycle into Cowfee Tawk application in order to improve the user experience.

Before moving into the usability engineering life cycle, let’s look at what usability is.

What is Usability?

Usability means, how to achieve required goals effectively and efficiently in products such as software, web and mobile applications. Simply how a user can easily use a software product.

Below are a few commonly used factors of usability,

• Effectiveness
• Efficiency
• Engagement
• Error Tolerance
• Ease of Learning

NOTE: Above listed factors may differ from a company’s scope.

What is Usability Engineering Life Cycle?

Usability Engineering Life Cycle is a sequence of phases that are used in software product development to improve usability design, analysis and testing.

Below shows the phases of Usability Engineering Life Cycle,

• Understanding the user
• Competitive Analysis
• Setting Usability goals
• Parallel Design
• Participatory design
• Coordinate design of the total interface
• Apply guideline and heuristic Analysis
• Prototyping
• Empirical Testing
• Iterative Design
• Collect feedback field user

Now let see how each phase of usability engineering life cycle is followed in Cawfee Tawk application.

Understanding the user -

In order to get a better understanding of the users of the system, our design crew had to go through an analysis of the customers and staff members of the coffee shop and how they are going to use the system.

Setting usability goals -

After identifying the user, we have decided to follow all the usability characteristics, but we mainly focus on efficiency and engagement. The main reason to focus more on efficiency is that the user needs to perform the tasks quickly and easily through the application. Also, users have to be satisfied with the process of the application.

Parallel design -

Since our team had sufficient time to design and a batch of intern UX designers were available at that point in time, each intern worked independently on the initial design from the same set of requirements. Once after finishing the designs, the UX team was able to get the best design solution out of all.

Participatory design -

After we come up with the design, we conduct a meeting with the users. Since those users are not designers, we showed them our design ideas and note down their feedback and also note down their expectations of how the application should look like. After design we asked a few questions to know what additional features they prefer, and why they need that features. This helped us to get an idea of what they love and what features they expect.

Coordinate design of the total interface -

The design process of the application is carried out by several designers in the team. Therefore to maintain the consistency of the design, we have allocated one member as coordinator to this project.

Prototyping -

The prototype was helpful in showing the flow of the design solution and gathering feedback from users before constructing the final product. Our UX team collaboratively contributed to creating the prototypes with the guidance of the coordinator.

Empirical testing -

Once the prototype is finalized, empirical testing is conducted to optimize the user experience. We conduct a meeting with users and present our prototype to record their responses. And then the design team do modifications to the prototypes as per the user responses.

Iterative design -

As our company is using agile methodology, iterative design is followed in order to improve the design. Our team has repetitively gotten the user feedback and done the refinements accordingly.

Collect feedback field users -

Our client requested to maintain the application after delivering the product. Therefore in the final phase of the usability engineering life cycle, we collect the user feedback from end users and do modifications in future releases to improve usability.

I hope you got a clear understanding of how Sri Lankan software companies adopt usability into their actual product environment

Thank you all for spending your time reading this article.