Sagara Asia Blog

Author: Sagara Technology

  • A Use Case for Proper Mobile Apps Development

    A Use Case for Proper Mobile Apps Development

    Nowadays, people are spending more time on their smartphones and mobile devices. If you are a startup or an established business, creating a great mobile app is a method to increase your visibility and put you in front of the competition. You can hire dedicated developer or one of the top app development companies to help you build your desired application depend on your project scale.

    Whatever you choose, it can be extremely profitable if you know what you’re doing, so make sure of what you intend to accomplish within the app, whether you want to ride the wave of other competitors or to resolve a problem, and how it will drive your business.

    So, here’s a use case from Hicham Moutahir that you can keep in mind when you want to develop mobile apps for your business.

    1. Discovery Stage — Laying Down the Foundation of Your Mobile App

    This stage is a term for pre-development research. It meant to define the goals, the problem(s), and the expectations of the end-users. The step on this stage consist of:

    • Competition is a good way to kick off your project and position yourself to outperform the other apps in your chosen category, for examples, number of installs, company history, star rating, and reviews.
    • Ideation is the time to confront your potential idea’s validity and viability to be profitable in the long run. It would come from a problem that you or people around you faced or a problem that you want to address.
    • Knowing your target market/audience by conducting a proper market research, Age, gender, location, hobbies, or actual phone brand your target demographic uses are a few useful metrics to define a specific target that you will cater to.
    • Monetizing your app. In-app purchases, sponsorships, ad revenue, crowdfunding, freemium model, and traditional paid ads are a few ways you can explore to monetize your app.
    • Defining MVP. MVP is a testable product that is feature incomplete. It helps you collect data and user feedback at an early stage. Based on this feedback, you will be making incremental improvements to the subsequent iterations.

    2. UX Design — Designing User Experience for Your App

    UX design is an ongoing process that provide meaningful and relevant experiences to users. That is about enhancing customers’ satisfaction level by offering optimal app usability and a smooth experience. Information Architecture (to maximize accessibility and ease of use), Wireframing your Apps (to show the skeletal framework of an app, explain a concept, and set reasonable expectations), and Clickable prototype (to identify obvious surface flaws) are included in the UX Design process.

    3. UI Design — Crafting the Aesthetic & Functionally of Your App

    UI defines how of your app looks and behaves visually (ex: animations). These are the process of UI Design:

    • Create Rendered Design
    • Develop a Rendered Click-Through Design
    • Keep it Aesthetically Pleasing
    • Follow and Use the Latest UI Trends
    • Conduct Beta Testing

    4. Design to Development Handoff

    It requires constant communication between designers and developers from the early stage of the project. Follow these steps below to ensure a smooth collaboration between designers and developers.

    • Design Files to Stay Organized
    • Share Key User Goals
    • Share Prototype with Developer
    • Share Design Specs (Opacity, Colors, Fonts, Height & Width, Alignment, and Spacing)
    • Final Words, paramount to delivering a quality product

    5. High Level Technical Design — Deciding Technical Aspects for Your App

    It refers to the stage where you decide on a programming language, development approach, and suitable technologies for your mobile app.
    Front End, There are three approaches that often used to develop the front-end of an app, namely Platform-Specific Native App, Cross-Platform Native App, and Hybrid App.
    Back End, You could consider the following factors before writing the code, which are: Choosing a Programming Language (C#, Java, Python, .NET, PHP, etc.), Database and Data Structures (MySQL, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, etc.), and Hosting.

    6. Mobile App Development — Step by Step Approach

    The best approach used for mobile app development is in sprint or agile methodology in which all development efforts are divided into smaller subtasks and milestones. The development process iterates through a series of stages including planning, development, testing (functional, performance, edge-case, device-specific, UT & UAT), and review.

    7. Deployment

    Application deployment best practices includes release cycles, continuous deployment, developer certifications, automation, hosting environments, app features, web API (server), and apple/google app store. Still, you need to continually build new enhancements and fix issues to ensure the success of your app.

    8. Mobile App Monitoring

    These are the things that you need to monitor after the deployment process, which are start and resume time, crashes, UI response time, analytics, technical performances, app store management, battery and cellular data consumption.

    9. Further Mobile App Improvements

    Upgrading your app with new insight to enhance its visibility and increase app downloads. The update goals is to meet the evolving user expectations as well as ever-changing guidelines of various platforms. The improvements itself is based on the user feedback. User insight and competitor research can help in adding new features and keep it fresh and up-to-date.

    In conclusion, it is easy to build an app, but it takes effort to build one that users like. Ensure that you hire a top app development company to get a wonderful product.

    Expanding Your Mobile app with Sagara Technology.


  • Creating User Journey for Apps Development

    Creating User Journey for Apps Development

    A user journey is a timeline of user actions that describes the relationship between your brand and its customers. It’s a visualization of all of a user’s interactions with your product, from their point of view.

    A user journey mapping is a visual representation of the “story” from a customer’s perspective. User journey mapping creates a timeline of all touchpoints between a customer and your organization, including all channels they happen in.

    The most important aspect of the map is that it be from the user’s point of view. This is not a product roadmap that outlines how you plan to release new features over the course of a year. Rather, it is a retelling of the user journey from onboarding to conversion and beyond.

    Read more: How to Create User Persona for Digital Product?

    The 8-steps process of user journey mapping

    Before creating a user journey map, it’s important to review the goals of your business/service. This knowledge will help you align business and user goals.

    1. Choose a scope

    The scope of the user journey map can vary from the high-level map which shows end-to-end experience to a more detailed map that focuses on one particular interaction (for instance, paying a bill).

    2. Create a user persona

    Who is your user?A user journey map is always focused on the experience of one main actor — a user persona who experiences the journey.User persona should always be created based on information you have about your target audience. That’s why always start with user research. Having solid information about your users will prevent you from making false assumptions.

    Gather and analyze all available information about your target audience

    Interview your real or potential users

    Conduct contextual inquiry

    Analyze the results of user surveys

    3. Define scenario and user expectations

    The scenario describes a situation where the journey map addresses. It can be real or anticipated. It’s also important to define what expectations a user persona has about the interaction. For example, a scenario can be — ordering a taxi using a mobile app with expectations to get the car in 5 minutes or less.

    4. Create a list of touchpoints

    Touchpoints are user actions and interactions with the product/business. It’s vital to identify all main touchpoints and all channels associated with each touchpoint. For example, for touchpoint ‘Buy a gift,’ channels can be — purchase online or buy in a store.

    5. Take user intention into account

    What motivates your user to interact with your product?What problem are users looking to solve when they decide to use your product? Different user segments will have different reasons.Let’s take an e-commerce website. There is a big difference between a user who is just looking around and a user who wants to accomplish a specific task (purchase a particular product).For each user journey it’s vital to understand:

     

    Motivation. Why are they trying to do it?

    Channels. Where interaction takes place

    Actions. The actual behaviors and steps taken by users.

    Pain points. What are the challenges users are facing?

    6. Sketch the journey

    Put together all the information you have and sketch a journey in a format of step-by-step interaction. Each step demonstrates an experience that the persona has with a service/product or another person.

    7. Consider a user’s emotional state during each step of interaction

    What does a user feel when interacting with your product? Products we design need to mirror the state of mind of our users. When we consider a user’s emotional state, this knowledge will help us to connect with users on a human level. That’s why it’s important to add an emotional lane to the user journey map. By visualizing the emotional “ups” and “downs” of the experience you’ll show the areas of experience that require refinement.

    8. Validate and refine user journey

    Journey maps should result in truthful narratives, not fairy tales. Even when a user journey is based on user research, it’s vital to validate it. Use the information from usability testing sessions and app analytics to be sure that your journey resembles a real use case.Gather and analyze information about your users on a regular basis. For example, user feedback is something that can be used to improve your understanding of the user journey.It’s important to remember that the goal of creating a user journey map is to create a shared vision. That’s why once a user journey map is created, share it with your peers. Make it possible for everyone in your team to look at the entire experience from the user’s standpoint and user this information while crafting a product.

     

     

  • How to Create User Persona for Digital Product?

    How to Create User Persona for Digital Product?

    A user persona is a representation of your target user. At the most basic level, personas allow you to personalize or target your marketing for different segments of your audience. Personas provide you with insight into how to make offerings and marketing messaging relevant and successful as a result. Personas allow you to map out and create highly-targeted content, that’s why it’s highly recommended to define personas while building a communication strategy for your product.

    The main purpose of a user persona is to create empathy for customers. Understanding and relating to what matters to your customers is an essential part of product management. This requires ongoing research about target user segments so you can build an informed roadmap.

    Personas are an effective way to capture and share this research. You can distill the most important attributes of people who use your product — such as their goals, challenges, likes, and dislikes. This information shapes your product strategy and keeps the entire product team stays focused on creating an outstanding customer experience.

    Here are the key benefits of defining user personas:

    • Explain the “why” behind product decisions
    • Focus on the needs of the most important user groups
    • Prioritize features that solve actual user problems
    • Implement new functionality in line with how customers will actually use it


    Read more: Step by Step of User Experience Design for Digital Product


    How to create user personas for digital products?

    This guide describes the steps to create user personas :

    1. Understand Who Will Use Your Products

    Persona must be as truthful as possible, so it is important to spend time learning as much as possible about your target users. What is their role? How long have they been in their industry? What are their likes and dislikes? This information helps you envision a typical user and view your product from their perspective.

    The specific details you need to capture will vary based on your industry, market, and type of product. Here are the different types of information that can be useful to gather:

    • Personal Background: Age, education, and location
    • Professional background: Job title, income level, skills, responsibilities, and experience
    • Psychographic information: Goals, challenges, likes, and dislikes

    You can use qualitative and quantitative data to inform your research; such as directly interviewing users, reading support tickets, talking to terms who interact with users, and analyzing product usage.

    2. Group your typical users

    You will most likely need to create multiple personas to represent different groups of users. Once you have gathered sufficient data, look for distinct characteristics and behavior patterns. Each group of user personas has a unique set of goals, needs, and wants. Understanding the differences between these groups is essential to guiding how new product features are prioritized, designed, and developed.

    3. Build out a user persona template

    Now you are ready to build out your personas. Give each one a name and select an image to represent and make your persona memorable. Then, write up an overview that distills the essential elements of their background and preferences.

    4. Share user personas with the team

    Once created, share your personas with key members of your organization. Whatever format you choose, it is important to make your personas easily accessible to the entire team. Associating personas with your goals, initiatives, releases, and features will keep your customers top of mind and present in everything you do.

    Well-crafted personas are a great way to communicate research about your target customers. These are useful reminders of the ultimate purpose of your product, to serve the needs of real people. When you know exactly who your user is and what they want to achieve with your product, you can deliver solutions that truly delight them.