Evaluating Faculty Science Computer & Mathematics (FSKM) Sistem Permohonan Surat Pelajar' application using cognitive walkthrough / Ummiral Nordin

Mobile application for 'Sistem Permohonan Surat Pelajar' (SPSP) are use to ease student to request formal letter and view the status of letter they requested from academic office. Students can save their time by using the SPSP application and do not need directly go to academic office to apply letter and check if the letter they requested is ready or not. The interface of SPSP application should be easy to use where students will be able to retrieve the content and not only focus on the interaction with the application. The usefulness of mobile devices has increased greatly in recent years allowing users to perform more tasks in a mobile context. This increase in usefulness has come at the expense of the usability of these devices in some contexts. Therefore, usability plays an important role in the success of every application. Cognitive walkthrough is a technique for evaluating the design of a user interface, with special attention to how well the interface supports exploratory learning, such as first-time use without formal training. Early versions of the walkthrough method relied on a detailed series of questions, to be answered on paper or electronic forms. However, based on interview that conducted with the developer SPSP application said that very important to know the feedback from viewers of students FSKM itself about performance of this application in terms of effectiveness, efficiency and error while navigate this application. Furthermore, usability testing hasnot been conducted since develop this application. The objectives of this project is to evaluate the usability problem of FSKM 'Sistem Permohonan Surat Pelajar' application using usability evaluation method and provide recommendations to improve user interface according to identified in this application according to the identified usability problem. This project specifically focuses on mobile application users from different background using cognitive walkthrough method. Usability testing was conducted on five (5) participants where they had been interviewed and performed series of tasks to identify the usability problem of SPSP application. The results show that interface design of SPSP application is unattractive and participants were having difficulties in performing the tasks that being assigned. Certain materials and content is not accessible and important information not been included in the SPSP application. The deliverables of this project would assist the developer of SPSP application to identify usability problems that exist and provide a guideline for him to improve the quality of design. Through usability testing, the usability problems can be identified and recommendations can be suggested to improve the user interface design for the application.