Solteq way of modernizing applications

In case you have an application, either mobile or web application that is not what you are looking for. It does what it supposed to do, but it is not gaining the attention of the users as you hoped for or it cannot compete with other products at the market. Don’t be worried, if you application is built on modern architecture, it’s not complete waste of money and there could be legit way to find the tools to grow the audience. You may need to modernize the UI for your application and that might sound much worse than it actually is.

Here's how we could be doing it with you…. 

At first, we do some visual designing and prototyping with you then we will move on to feature definition and implementation.  

Solteq’s Lead Visual designer, Mikki Kuukkanen describes the process from UX design to prototyping. 

UX design (User Experience design)  

Define the personas   

The first thing in UX design process is that we get to know the target audience. This is very important step because we need to keep the focus on those who will be using the actual service. On an average service there are usually couple of easily identified user personas. In workshops we try to empathize with these fictional personas by defining their demographics, personality, motivation, goals, challenges & solutions and use case scenarios. The content of one persona can slightly vary based on service that we're building. Finalized personas are presented as visual templates.   

By defining personas it's much easier for the stakeholders to empathize with target audience. This exercise also reveals pitfalls on user journey, helps us to solve problems and ideate new functionalities.   

Personas can be easily extended to complete customer journeys. Alongside this exercise we define persona-based use cases and user flows which helps us to move on to the next exercise, prototyping.   

Personas top benefits :

• Cost effective way to get to know the end users 

• Forces us to focus on the most important - the actual users of the service 

• Helps us overcome obstacles on a user journey 

• Storm completely new ideas based on real user needs 

 Build a prototype

Prototyping is a method which allows us to quickly make ideas tangible and test functionalities without any development (coding). A prototype is an interactive (clickable) presentation of the service we're dealing with. It is built based on the functionalities and use cases defined in the personas exercise.   

Prototyping top benefits :

• Test the user experience of your concept without any coding 

• Very cost-effective way to interact with nearly "finished" product functionality 

• Engage stakeholders by making an idea "tangible" 

• Facilitate the elicitation of user, product, and system requirements 

• Avoid wasting resources by finding problems and ill-guided directions early in the project 

• Testable design artefact  

After we’ve done proper designing and prototype it’s clearer that we, with our UI designer and with your end users, are speaking the same language. Then we can define the process better and describe the features and functionality of the solution so that it is clear for developers to start building the solution. 

Iterative design and development are always good, but iteration in the early stages while doing the UX design and prototype reduces the need for extensive iteration in the implementation phase. Of course, it’s still important to remember that the agile way of developing solutions means features and scope might live during the project. 

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