LoveWorldSAT Mobile App

Project Overview

To develop new mobile apps for the organization, improving on the existing one, and stretching into other platforms (iPhone, Blackberry and Windows Phone).

My Role

My task was to develop the apps, so it started with UX Design responsibilities, to UI Design, and then development and deployment. There was a team to assist with content and administrative tasks.

Explore (Empathise) + Define

The business case was clear – be available on other platforms. The user research part needed work, and the first was to justify getting on other platforms, so I researched the country usage of our app, website and social media. We also checked the mobile device type of our website visitors. Apparently, the multi-platform strategy was justifiable, because of the prevalent use of Blackberry and Windows phones in areas where we had a large concentration of users.  We also interviewed a handful of users, remotely and face-to-face, identifying pain points, and gathering reserh to help create our personas.

Other business needs were to encourage engagements from users, in phone calls, emails, SMSs among other forms of communication, as well as increase app downloads and engagement. The Inception meeting was to clarify the scope of work with the Product Owner, and we immediately went into a Sprint Planning session, the result being a completion of Ideation, with the sketch shown below being one of the artifacts created from the meeting.

Design + Test

Our Personas involved people who had the data to consume all of our contents, the average users, and those who would not expend much data, but still wanted to be in the loop. We thus had to have enough for all the segments.

We decided on having a blog, that would pull info from our website, via RSS feeds. In the same manner, the gallery would pull from our Instagram, and our Flickr, and the video-on-demand will be our YouTube feed. The above solved the challenge of having a sustainable flow of content on the app.

The Product Owner gave us a free hand to complete the project, and present a finished product, as they were not interested in the sprint results, so we ran those stages – Design Sprints, Stand-ups, Testing – within the unit, and with the assistant of an external observer and voluntary testers.

Results

Initially, we had an autoplay video on the Index page, and this definitely alienated the people who wouldn’t want to use a ot of data on the app. We thus changed it to a Clickable Live TV module, that needs to be activated to start playing.

A slide-in menu also listed all the section of the app for ease of use.

Challenges

The only challenge I may have faced was how I played several roles in the project – UX, UI, Scrum Master and Developer, but the good thing about those are that I took courses in all the mentioned roles, and gained certifications, as well as in Product Management. I believe this would allow me to empathize and relate better in a cross-functional team, having being in a lot of the roles.

Conclusions

The project turned out well. We decided on a multi-platform development method, due to the availability of manpower to handle development on all the platforms, trading off on the minute app speed, a risk we could take due to the loyalty of our users.