User interface redesigning based on a usability design framework

Abstract

A usable user interface relies heavily on experience of designers. The resulted user interface helps ensure that important and critical information from senders reaches the intended recipients. Achievement of this particular goal is crucial, especially for mobile government application. Nowadays, mobile application becomes an essential tool to connect governments and citizens. So citizens can access government services as well as fulfill their responsibilities as good citizens. Unusable or unable to access applications affects how well citizens perform their duties and live their lives. In order to promote the use of mobile government applications, usability needs to be designed carefully. Several of the applications are tasked to delivery important or urgent messages to citizens. Such applications include Early Warning System (EWS), Earthquake Report, Weather Forecast, etc. Their main goals are to deliver critical information which could affect millions of lives. Incorporating usability to the user interface can facilitate effective dissemination of such critical information to prevent catastrophic loss. Thus, it is important that the intended citizens receive the right information, in the right place at the right time. Most usability models, which are used to guide engineering of usability, are not specific to mobile government applications. Many of them are too abstract. Thus, a more appropriate usability model and a comprehensive design guideline are needed by the stakeholders involved with the design of mobile government applications. This paper illustrates how such applications can be redesigned based on the framework proposed in this paper to achieve a higher level of usability.