Interface Usability Of A Flower Shop App

Discuss about the Interface Usability of a Flower Shop App.
 

The flower shop named “Flowerish” has planned to develop a mobile app. The shop sells flowers, bouquets and related services to the individual and corporate customers. Even though the shop has a website but it does not help in increasing the volume of the business. Therefore it decided to develop a mobile app and launch it in the market to attract the new customers and increase the volume of the business by competing with the rivals in the market.

The mobile app that is intended to develop for the flower shop “Flowerish” will help the shop to have its online presence to a higher level. By introducing this new app, the shop tries to fill the gap between the modern day customer demands and the supply from the shops (Dunford et al., 2014). As the ubiquity of the smart devices or say smart phones are getting increased day by day, therefore the development and the introduction of the mobile app is going to help both the shop by increasing the amount of revenue from the business (de Andrade et al., 2015). Moreover, the customers can order and get their flower just by booking it on the app on real time basis.

The website of the shop does not provide any information about products or services from the flower shop.  Therefore, by introducing the app for its business the vision of the flower shop is to provide information about the availability of the flowers in the different occasions like the mother’s day, father’s day, valentine’s day etc . According to a survey it is estimated that, the number of smart phone users in Australia in 2017 will be almost 19.4 million (Xanthopoulos & Xinogalos, 2013). Therefore the app will help the shop to have a successful penetration in the niche markets.

The outcome of this project is an app that will display and provide information about the bestselling flowers and services from the shop. The interface of the app will help the customer to choose the flowers from a wide variety. Moreover, the flowers that are not in the stocks are going to be placed in the special order category. At the same time the staffs will be notified by the app whenever a booking is done so that the products can be packaged and delivered on time (de Andrade et al., 2015).  These features are going to help the shop in competing with the rivals in the business.

Vision

The project scope includes the development of the app according to the client (in this case the “Flowerish”). The scope of the project includes the configuration and development of the mobile app. Moreover to manage the content and features, publishing of the content on the app is also include (Xanthopoulos & Xinogalos, 2013). In addition to that, the scope also can be extended to include the other beneficial areas like the use of the new marketing methods by using the social networking platforms (Abel et al., 2013). The financial impact of this project will be a little overhead for the flower shop. The reason behind the overhead is the fees of the consultants, the cost related to designing questionnaires and accreditation certificates for the app.

The scope of the project does not include the day to day maintenance of the app. Customization of the existing specifications or services   to meet the shops business needs is also excluded from the scope of this project. 

 The objective of the app development project is to provide an app to “Flowerish”. This app will help “Flowerish” to increase its business.

 The expected objectives of the project includes the following,

1. a) To encourage the flower shop to reduce the operational and advertising cost and improve the business performance (Joorabchi, Mesbah & Kruchten, 2013).
2. b) To effectively manage the inventory management system of the shop.

Moreover, it is expected that the successful completion and implementation of the project at the clients end will increase the business of the flower shop by 50%.    

The output of the project will be very beneficial for the flower shop as well as its customers. For the shop

1. a) “Flowerish” will have a better online presence at the same time it can attract the potential customers who are using the smart phones (Abel et al., 2013). Unlike its website, the app will be updated and maintained periodically and on a regular basis.
2. b) The features of the app will help the shop to enter a successful niche market.
3. c) Customers can view, buy, comment and provide review on the products that are available on the shops app.
4. d) The customers can chat with each other about the products (Magrath & McCormick, 2015). Moreover by using the loyalty scheme the customer can have cheaper deals on the flowers by using the app.

 The target customers are mainly the tech-savvy people who use their smart phones or devices to do online shopping or transactions. In addition to that the older and disabled people who cannot travel to the shops can also book the products using the app. In addition to that, the target of the shop can be given by entering into a niche market by providing the discounted rates on the flowers, bouquets and services (Joorabchi, Mesbah & Kruchten, 2013).  At the same time the app will have a notification system that is going to notify the staffs of the shop whenever order is booked.      

 The success criteria for the app development project depends on the user involvement in the development, clear and specified requirements from the client side (In this case the flower shop), proper planning of the development procedure. The users of the app must be satisfied with the design development methodology of the mobile app (Magrath & McCormick, 2015).   Moreover the, completion of the small milestones in the in the whole process, clear vision with objectives and the hardworking staffs are the main criteria’s for the successful completion of the app development project (Joorabchi, Mesbah & Kruchten, 2013). Since the app is developed for a flower shop, that is going to help it to increase its business, therefore it’s important for the developers to clearly understand the client requirements to avoid any conflict at any phase of the development.  On the other hand the hardworking staffs are helpful for the flower shop to increase the effectiveness of the app.      

Outcomes

The new app of the flower shop system assumes that the individual is using the smart device or a smart phone running the Android OS version 4.4 or greater. The hardware specifications of the device should meet or exceed than the LG G5 model. Moreover, the appropriate extension needs to be installed in the device. The extensions like the Text to Speech and Speech to Text should be loaded on the smart phones (Heitkötter, Hanschke & Majchrzak, 2012). In addition to that, it is to be ensured that all the participants should abide by the guidelines according to the project development plan. The project development plan may change as per the new information’s and issues are identified by the flower shop (Marcano Belisario et al., 2015). The failure in detecting the changes and drafting the deliverables according to the schedule will result in the project delays. 

References

Abel, O., Shatunov, A., Jones, A. R., Andersen, P. M., Powell, J. F., & Al-Chalabi, A. (2013). Development of a smartphone app for a genetics website: the amyotrophic lateral sclerosis online genetics database (ALSoD). JMIR mHealth and uHealth, 1(2).

de Andrade, P. R., Albuquerque, A. B., Frota, O. F., Silveira, R. V., & da Silva, F. A. (2015). Cross platform app: a comparative study. arXiv preprint arXiv:1503.03511.

Dunford, E., Trevena, H., Goodsell, C., Ng, K. H., Webster, J., Millis, A., ... & Neal, B. (2014). FoodSwitch: a mobile phone app to enable consumers to make healthier food choices and crowdsourcing of national food composition data. JMIR mHealth and uHealth, 2(3), e37.

Heitkötter, H., Hanschke, S., & Majchrzak, T. A. (2012, April). Evaluating cross-platform development approaches for mobile applications. InInternational Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies (pp. 120-138). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.

Joorabchi, M. E., Mesbah, A., & Kruchten, P. (2013, October). Real challenges in mobile app development. In 2013 ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (pp. 15-24). IEEE.

Luterbach, K. J., & Hubbell, K. R. (2015). Capitalizing on App Development Tools and Technologies. TechTrends, 59(4), 62-70.

Magrath, V., & McCormick, H. (2013). Marketing design elements of mobile fashion retail apps. Journal of Fashion Marketing and Management: An International Journal, 17(1), 115-134.

Marcano Belisario, J. S., Jamsek, J., Huckvale, K., O'Donoghue, J., Morrison, C. P., & Car, J. (2015). Comparison of selfâ€Âadministered survey questionnaire responses collected using mobile apps versus other methods.The Cochrane Library.

Xanthopoulos, S., & Xinogalos, S. (2013, September). A comparative analysis of cross-platform development approaches for mobile applications. In Proceedings of the 6th Balkan Conference in Informatics (pp. 213-220). ACM.