Greg, founder of the business SAM4SCHOOL, Camberwell VIC 3124 Australia, contacted Imajine purely for UX/UI design for their ASP.NET based compliance management application for school.
This school compliance management application is used across schools in Camberwell Victoria.
SERVICE
It’s a multi-user, multi-vendor application. The application users include – vendors, schools and system admin. The main function of SAM4SCHOOL web application is schools can publish their requirement, registered and relevant vendors can bid for the same and finally school can screen/filter and choose an appropriate vendor for their requirement.
To register in our SAM4SCHOOL application, all the compliance service providers/vendors have to fill in a detailed form available in the application and upload their Australian company registration document. SAM4SCHOOL takes full responsibility to screen vendor credentials before approving the application.
Why UX/UI for an application?
A well designed application is forgiving. We overlook small errors in well-designed tool/application. An application designed specially for target market is ‘easy to use’. An application should be both eye pleasing and easy to use.
An easy to use design is extremely critical for business, a good UX keeps the users happy and also contributes in business growth.
To achieve this objective we should map the user-type and understand the user.
How do we understand the thought process of application user?
Once we have the clarity on business target market, we can jot down user’s demography – age group, gender, geography, percentage of computer literacy, economical background, access to devices etc etc. All this information is vital and only completes 30% of our job. Rest 70% is analysing the user-types. This can be best achieved by staying invisible and observing the user’s day to day activities or how user’s use application similar/related to the one planned for the business. All the above requires a lot of involvement. And the percentage of information we can draw may also not be 100% accurate.
You may be wondering on how can anybody be invisible and observe the user. OK I shall give a simple example on staying invisible and observing the user.
Say we are planning to build an application for a bank. In such a scenario, the designer can opt to work in the bank pretending to be their employee, keep a low profile and observe the customers (considering these customers are our target market). Stay low and observe. When we stay low, the customer is not conscious instead will freely conduct their job/activity not even realising that somebody is actually observing them. This activity will contribute greatly to our analysis. This is more of a practical tip. It’s all in designer’s hand on how to go about ‘User Centred Analysis’ activity.
If we can stay neutral without any preconceived judgement on both business objective/product and user-type while on this activity to observe the users and jot down the observation, we almost always widen our perspective. Which is so useful and extremely helpful in designing the best user experience design. This activity gives us a lot of clarity on user’s behaviour, user’s expectations from an app and how users achieve their objective in the app.
This is just one scenario, you can go about your objective in many different ways. It may not always work out. But getting started will always lead us to a better place.