LEARNING LAUNCH

CHALLENGE

I work as a designer of mobile applications. The primary goal of designing and developing mobile  applications is ease of use with which the user can perform complex real-world tasks.

Recently, we had a client who had come to us requesting for re-designing of their existing application  which was already present on the AppStore. They had received poor ratings for the application’s user  experience and were losing their client base to their competition.

As a preliminary step, we collected the following information from our stakeholders.

•  Feature list - We made a list of the features that the client is interested in providing to their  client base through the application.

•  Feedback collection – We then collected all the user comments and ratings that the client had  received since the launch of their existing application and categorized them.

•  Market competition – We also checked the user experiences provided by similar applications  in the market in order to determine what-wows.

On rigorous study of data available, we could narrow down the issues to the following:

•  Usage of animations were time killers and made the job of the user difficult.

•  Use of icons to perform tasks were not intuitive to the users.

•  There were too many complex workflows spanning across multiple screens.

SELECTION

With the required features list and the problem points identified, we had a fair bit of understanding of  solution. While designing the solution, we heard from the stakeholders about the onboarding  meeting they had scheduled with their new clients. We identified that as a great opportunity to get  first-hand user feedback.

APPLICATION

We designed an interactive solution where the design software would respond to user interactions  just as in the mobile application. This was way before the mobile application was developed. We  wanted to test the application and get feedback from the user as early as possible.

Few of the solutions we had incorporated in the proposed solution were:

•  Simplified workflows – We had minimized the clicks count to as low as three per task i.e we  ensured that an user task would be completed with a maximum of three clicks

•  Animations – As the userbase used the application to get things done, we realized that they  would very likely be interested in animations. We also had user reviews to support this  theory. So we got rid of them all.

•  Intuitive UI – Our new designs mostly used text instructions and commonly used icons to  depict functionalities. This was to ensure that even a new user should be able to traverse and  use the application effectively.

INSIGHT

After the new clients onboarding meeting, we had a fair amount of understanding of which problems  we were able to successfully resolve and what parts of design required modifications.

With learning launch, we were able to solve a problem by just prototyping the solution saving heavily  in terms of cost, resources and time of both the user and the stakeholders involved.

APPROACH

We, use learning launch as an organizational tool on most of our projects. The prototypes designed,  sometimes even enables us to showcase our efforts and win new opportunities.

