Developing Mobile App is All About What Users Need
So a long story short, I was taking one of the courses at my university, especially majoring in computer science, namely software projects (Proyek Perangkat Lunak). As the name implies, in this course I was given the task of creating a team of five people and making software with predetermined topics. My team got the topic of creating mobile applications that are involved in academia, especially in the field of law. The name of the application is Pantau Peradilanmu. Well, in this article I will briefly explain why developing this mobile app is all about what users need.
What is User Centered Design?
User-centered design (UCD) is an iterative design process in which designers focus on the users and their needs in each phase of the design process. In UCD, design teams involve users throughout the design process via a variety of research and design techniques, to create highly usable and accessible products for them.
UCD is an Iterative Process
In user-centered design, designers use a mixture of investigative methods and tools (e.g., surveys and interviews) and generative ones (e.g., brainstorming) to develop an understanding of user needs.
Generally, each iteration of the UCD approach involves four distinct phases. First, as designers working in teams, we try to understand the context in which users may use a system. Then, we identify and specify the users’ requirements. A design phase follows, in which the design team develops solutions. The team then proceeds to an evaluation phase. Here, you assess the outcomes of the evaluation against the users’ context and requirements, to check how well a design is performing. More specifically, you see how close it is to a level that matches the users’ specific context and satisfies all of their relevant needs. From here, your team makes further iterations of these four phases, and you continue until the evaluation results are satisfactory.
User centered design principles adhere to the following responsive factors:
- A clear understanding of the users, tasks, and environments. — The one thing that needs to be done is to know the users, what they need to do, and the environment that they faced because it will affect their behavior on how they will use the product. This will help break down the user requirement that will be used by the team to be developed.
- Incorporating user feedback to define requirements and design. This where we can evaluate whether the product that has been made already meets the user's requirement. Early and active involvement of the user to evaluate the design of the product. This will make the requirement for early development smaller.
- Integrate with other development activities, everyone in the team needs to be involved in. Iterative design process that will work not only for agile but also for other frameworks. The process will make the team understand more about the users
What is Persona?
Personas are fictional characters, which you create based upon your research in order to represent the different user types that might use your service, product, site, or brand in a similar way. Creating personas will help you to understand your users’ needs, experiences, behaviors, and goals. Creating personas can help you step out of yourself. It can help you to recognize that different people have different needs and expectations, and it can also help you to identify with the user you’re designing for. Personas make the design task at hand less complex, guide your ideation processes, and they can help you to achieve the goal of creating a good user experience for your target user group.
In making a Persona the first thing we have to do is collect the data needed and analyze it. In the enterprise market, a persona can be defined as the worker group, or groups, whose work will be affected by the product or system being developed. Then identify the business objective and goals and decide how to tackle the solution. It is important to look for common patterns and trends within and between worker groups, this is so that we can find the behavior that the majority of user targets do. Personas should be written with the business objectives in mind and highlight users’ challenges and needs to be overcome by leveraging their goals, behaviors, preferences, and cutting-edge technology, with a reminder that each persona has a different personality. It needed to keep in mind that users are diverse and we are looking at the common pattern in between the diversity. And the end goal of this is to conclude the user target need.
What does a good user persona include?
User personas or marketing personas come in different styles and sizes, much like the actual customers they represent. If you’re asking what to include in your persona, the quick answer is: whatever is helpful to your company.
Each persona should include:
- Name: Could be realistic, could be taken from an actual customer, or it could be a descriptive handle like “Sally the Thrift-shopper.”
- Photo: It always helps to put a face to a name. Stock photos are fine but avoid photos of celebrities, coworkers, or other familiar faces that may come with built-in connotations and assumptions. The idea is to create a new, original identity.
- Personal quote/motto: Just like a photo, this helps flesh out the persona to make them seem more real.
- Bio: Give a little backstory to make the person relatable. What was their childhood like? Why did they choose their current job? How do they spend their free time? These tiny details could influence strategic choices down the road.
- Demographics: Age, sex, income, location — whatever attributes are relevant to your industry. The job title is particularly important, considering its business and financial implications.
- Personality Traits: People with low attention spans want faster site designs. Cautious people are most likely to comparison shops. Personality traits are one of the most useful features of personas, so choose these with care.
- Motivations: Like personality traits, this helps you get inside the customer’s heads and understand how they think. For example, would a customer be more likely to buy a product that improves their career or their personal life? It depends on which motivates them more.
- Goals and frustrations: The scope of these is in direct relation to your needs. A lifestyle company would keep to general life and career goals, while a tech company could hone in on more specific goals like tasks they hope to accomplish with their software.
- Preferred brands and influencers: You can tell a lot about a person based on which brands they like and what kind of people influence their decisions. You can also look at those brands’ marketing strategies to see if their tactics might apply to you as well.
Personas should be customized to your specific needs, so it’s better to create your own original personas than to use ones designed for other companies.
How to Create Persona?
Here are some steps you can take to create a persona:
Segment Your Audience
It is important to keep in mind that a persona is a collective image of a segment of your target audience (TA). It cannot be the face of the entire TA. Nor can it be just one person. You need somewhat of a golden middle.
So how many personas do you need for your project? The answer is here.
For our guide, we’ll take one hypothetical persona and this persona will be UXPressia potential user.
Set Demographic Info
Once you’ve done collecting data and segmentation, it is finally time to start creating a persona. It is reasonable to start with the most basic info — demographics.
Authentic demographic data is critical to developing true empathy. Lucky us, UXPressia lets you generate names and photos for personas so you don’t have to rack your brain for a unique name or photo.
Inside this section, you should include the most basic things like name, photo, age, marital status, job, income, residence, and so on. You may have noticed a green stripe on the name tile that says “Idealist”. In UXPressia we have this section to describe the type of personality and it’s a great way to know your personas.
Describe Persona Background
Describing the background is our next stop. Here, the more is better is the rule of thumb. Write down everything you know about your personas background.
Remember that any tiny detail may lead you to wonderful insight. On the other hand, avoid unnecessary information that may cause cluttering and confusion.
Define Persona Goals
Defining persona goals is extremely important because it allows you to see how your goals align with the goals of your customers. Not to mention that if you can meet customers’ needs better.
We’ll say that John is looking for a tool that allows him to present his ideas to his clients and management easily and without hours wasted on drawing everything from the ground up.
Motivations & Pain points
Finding what motivates and frustrates your customers is something you must include in personas. Once done, it will illuminate what you can do to win their hearts and loyalty.
In John’s case, his pain points may be that he doesn’t want to spend too much time learning the ropes of a tool. He also wants a balanced price/value ratio.
Speaking of his motivations, John is looking for some automation of his routine operations. Also, he’d love it if he could store his works in one place so he can access them from any computer.
Persona in My Team’s Project
So, in short, the application that my team created is a mobile application that will be used by students to monitor a court. The client who requests the application itself is the student’s lecturer who will use the application. Well, the client then conferred with the Product Owner regarding the requirements of the application. Then the Product Owner creates a Persona based on the results of the negotiations regarding who will use the application. Here are the results:
As you can see, of the four personas there are three main roles of users who will use this application, namely: students, lecturers, and teaching assistants. Each of these personas has a different background, goals, frustrations, and motivations. Then the task of my team as a development team is to design a design that meets all user needs according to the persona that has been created. Here are some of the designs that have been made:
This design is a page created based on motivation from the persona of Dovi Mateo, a student who wants to find out the location of the court around him easily. So, we created a feature that can display a list of available courts according to the user’s location.
This design is a page made based on the frustrations of the persona Ezra Lubis, a lecturer who didn’t have enough time to recap the individual student reports. So, we made a feature that can display an overview of the data from all monitoring reports and incident reports from all students.
That’s all I can share regarding why developing a mobile app is all about what users need. Thank you for reading this article. I hope you like it.
