APPLICATION DESIGN I - TASK 1: MARKET RESEARCH PROPOSAL
20/4/26 - 15/5/26 (Week 1 - Week 4)
Nicole Ng Ying Yan 0382412
Bachelor of Design (Hons) in Creative Media
DST60504 Application Design I
Task 1: Market Research Proposal
TABLE OF CONTENT
1.0 Lectures
2.0 Instructions
3.0 Market Research Proposal
4.0 Feedback
5.0 Reflection
1.0 LECTURES
WEEK 1: Introduction to Mobile Application Design
Why Application Design is Important?
- Provides a seamless user experience, boosting engagement, retention, and overall customer satisfaction.
Attention to detail in intuitive navigation, responsive layouts, and natural interactions can set successful apps apart from their competitors.
Laying the Foundation: Understanding Usability
- Defining usability
- Applying usability principles
- Conducting usability testing
- Developing practical skills
Importance of Mobile in the Digital Era
- Ubiquity of smartphones
- Mobile-first approach
- Shift in user behaviour
- Competitive advantage
Designing for Mobile: Embracing the Unique Challenges
- Limited screen real estate
- Require designers to prioritise content and interactions to ensure a clean, uncluttered user interface.
- Diverse device capabilities
- Ensure a consistent and responsive user experience across different platforms.
- Contextual awareness
- Designers must consider factors like location, connectivity, and user mobility when crafting the application's functionality and interface.
The User-Centered Design Approach
- Focuses on deeply understanding the target users and their needs.
- Involves an iterative process of research, ideation, prototyping, and testing to ensure the final product delivers a seamless and intuitive experience.
Applying User-Centered Design (UCD)
1. Research
- In-depth user research, gathering insights into their needs, behaviours, and pain points.
- Establish a solid understanding of the target audience and their specific requirements.
2. Design
- Wireframes, prototypes, and mockups that address the identified user needs.
- Involves continuous refinement and feedback gathering.
3. Evaluation
- To validate design decisions and identify areas for improvement.
- Ensures the final product meets user expectations.
Benefits of User-Centered Design
- Increased user satisfaction
- Reduced development costs
- Improved product adoption
- Enhanced brand reputation
Optimising for Performance
- Minimising app size.
- Leveraging caching and lazy loading techniques.
- Optimising network requests and data transmission.
WEEK 2: The Art of User-Centered Design
User Centered Design (UCD)
- Puts users at the forefront of the entire product development process.
- Understanding user needs and incorporating that understanding into every stage of design.
User Centered Design Process
- Discover/ Analysis
- Define business requirements (brand vision, goals, target audience, competitors)
- Develop user personas (motivations, goals, triggers, needs)
- Define
- Ideate solutions (campaign, website, software, product)
- Map user experience (user journey map, user scenario)
- Design
- Design user experience (user flow, task and feature analysis)
- Design user interface (sitemap and prototype)
- Validate
- Conduct usability testing
- Validate prototype
- Develop minimum viable product (MVP)
- Develop
- Production coding
User Experience Design (UX)
- A person’s perception and responses that result from the use or anticipated use of a product, service or system.
- Focuses on the users' feelings and experiences rather than our own perceptions.
User Interface Design (UI)
- Aesthetics, visual design, and finishes of the interior.
- What the users can see, hear, and feel.
UX vs UI
Fig. 1.0 UX vs UI
WEEK 3: Usability: Designing Products for User Satisfaction
What is Usability?
- Refers to the effectiveness, efficiency, and success of a user in utilising a product or design within a specific context.
- How well users can achieve their goals within a product or design.
- How quickly they can learn it and how many errors they encounter.
- Adapts to the user's situation and caters to their specific needs.
Common Usability Pitfalls
- Complex interfaces
- Confusing navigation
- Lack of clear CTAs
- Inadequate error handling
Key Principles of Usability
- Consistency
- Cohesive, familiar, and user-friendly experience.
- Intuitive navigation.
- Simplicity
- Easy to use, intuitive, and self-explanatory.
- Clear and concise communication.
- Visibility
- Have information clarity and clear visual hierarchy.
- Can be achieved through factors like size, colour, typography.
- Direct users' focus towards the elements that are most relevant in the current context.
- Feedback
- Provides users with a clear signal that their actions have been registered and understood by the app.
- E.g. textual messages, visual cues, sounds, haptic feedback.
- Error Prevention
- To reconfirm users actions before submission.
- Increases efficiency, spending less time to correct mistakes.
WEEK 4: Introduction to User Experience Research
Roles of UX Design
- Understand users' behaviour, goals, motivation, and needs.
- Observe user interaction with a system and identify pain points.
- Understanding user emotions during interaction.
- Ensure design process in grounded in user understanding.
UX Research Duties
- Develop coherent research methodologies.
- Select and recruit targeted end-users.
- Conduct individual interview with clients.
- Close collaboration with product team to steer future directions.
5 Steps of UX Research
- Objectives
- Hypotheses
- Methods
- Conduct
- Synthesise
UX Research Methods
1. Qualitative
- Investigates user behaviours, needs, and motivations.
- Provides rich, descriptive data.
- E.g. interviews, observations, user groups, usability testing.
2. Quantitative
- Uses numerical data and analytics to inform evidence-based design decisions.
- E.g. surveys, web/app analytics, eye tracking testing.
Week 4:
Remove the cons for direct competitors, and circle out the important parts of the images.
Week 3:
Make the problem statement way shorter, separate texts more with clear paragraphs.
Week 2:
Direct competitors can be websites too instead of apps as long as they provide similar services.
5.0 REFLECTION
For this task, I chose to work on TunaiApp which is an app that allows users to book salon appointments. I chose this app because I personally have used it before and thought it can be further improved. While testing the app, I found the app to be unresponsive and has a flawed flow. The app often shows a blank screen if there are nothing to display, which leaves users in a state of confusion. This made me realised how UI and UX design can heavily influence user experience and how frustrating it feels when apps are not meeting expectations. After researching, I found a few features from its direct competitors and left field that can be implemented into TunaiApp to enhance its user experience and improve user satisfaction.
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