Post #2 Development/ Implementation: The Journey of Mummy’s App website and application
ADandPRLAB/Digital Creativity LAB(Games,Apps and Coding)/Of Panteion University
Teachers : Betty Tsakarestou , Dr. Stavros Kaperonis
In our sessions on our #DigitalAndCreativityLab, we as a team(VISUALETTE) decided to create a Website and an Application dedicated to mothers, especially the new ones named “Mummy’sApp” . Because of that, our slogan is:We help mothers, be mothers.
In our previous post we described more specifically how we came up with the idea and the challenges we had to take to make it innovating, which lead us to create an online-exchange shop for baby accessories, in order to give to the new mother community a helping hand which is much needed.
But in order to get the best results for our website we had to ask our future users.We first started interviewing mothers from our families and women in the streets of Athens to see their thoughts about our project. They were all very delighted to hear that there would be an easy application even for them.Here are some of the best answers:
Maria 27 “Wow, I think that it would really help me.Being a working mother is really tough and now that the baby will arrive I must have an easy app to help me through the first days. I would definitely use it”.
Georgia 39 “ When I heard about the online exchange-store I thought that it would help me a lot.The truth is that now with the economic crisis it is really hard to find good quality baby accessories in affordable prices.I think that your app guys will be very helpful”.
After their possitive reactions we decided to move to our website.
http://mommysapp.tilda.ws/?fbclid=IwAR0yxjnphwLhFQf9BiOUrHpXVth0l_sjRwLHC_36gRRuPg8JOk7qIfCbZ9I
Creating a website in Tilda is not an easy task. At the beginning it was hard for us to choose how we want the structure of our website and the colors of it. It had to be family-friendly with warm colors that would attract the eye and that would offer a pleasant search for the mothers.
Within a month we finally made our website ,taking under consideration our lesson in our Lab “Digital CreativityLab(Games, Apps and Coding)” about the way the website should be made.
Then we had to move to the PROTOTYPE of Mummy’sApp.
We were lucky with this one because our Lab “Digital CreativityLab(Games, Apps and Coding)” had brought UX Prodigy and Magy Kontou, two powerful forces in the application industry. UX Prodigy taught us how to perform your own Usability/UX Reviews,in order to create an intuitive,efficient,effective,attractive,relevant,supportive,available,informative website but also how to do a heuristic evaluation over our website.
In order to conduct this heuristic evaluation, each member of our team individually went through five common user tasks and evaluated how easy to use our site was according to Jakob Nielsen’s Ten Usability Heuristics.
We created two personas one of a woman who is ready to have a children(8 months before giving birth) and a woman who is already a mother (3 weeks post-partum) that had to join our application and search about information
We realized that our website had many of the Usability Heuristics such as:
1.Visibility of system status(6/10)/Always keep users informed about what is going on./
2. Match between system and the real world(10/10)/Speak the users’ language, with words, phrases and concepts familiar to the user, rather than system oriented terms /Also follows real world conventions, making information appear in a natural and logical order/.
8. Aesthetic and minimalist design.(7/10)/Dialogues should not contain information which is irrelevant or rarely needed./Every extra unit of information in a dialogue competes with the relevant units of information and diminishes their relative visibility.
9. Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors(8/10)/Expressed in plain language (no codes)/Precisely indicate the problem/Constructively suggest a solution.
And then Maggy Kontou taught us how to use proto.io an online application that helps you create your own prototype. It was a tempting experience because creating an app from scratch is not as easy as we thought it was.
Thankfully, with the right guidance of Miss Maggy we managed to make it as useful as we could and we are very happy with our results especially because we never had any type of application experience in the past.
In the end, creating a website and an application about something you consider important is a rather challenging task to do.It requires patience and good communication with the group, happy and cheerful ideas and a lot of creativity together with hard work.We are glad that we have a powerful core as a team we were able to work easily.We had tensions but in the end of each day were stronger .
About our journey , we would not change it for a thing. We are glad that we were able to participate in such a good project and we learned a lot of things that had to do with applications, that will be much needed for our carrier. If we could consult new members of the Lab we would definitely suggest that they start their project and their brainstorming as soon as they get their idea, which will help them create their website easier without being anxious about the deadline.
As for the presentation, we had made many rehearsals and everyone choose the part that he/she had worked more.We considered ourselves on point and we really hope that we gave a good impression and our passion for our website was swan.
Thank you for your time,
THE VISUALETTE TEAM
