User-Centered Design
User-centered design (UCD) is an iterative design process in which the designers will focus on the users and their needs throughout the design process via a variety of research and design techniques to create highly usable and accessible products for them.
In our team, we are creating a Point-of-Sale (POS) for an application called Moodah that aims to ease and raise the performance of the transaction while also providing a connection to the inventory to be better managed.
In the making of a great product we must create the apps so that the user will LIKE using it, thus in the User-centered design process we will have to focus on making our product based around the users.
How you might ask? Simple! We gather information by doing research on many users and combining the result into a fictional “hypothetical” character to represent these users. These characters are called PERSONA.
PERSONA
Persona is created to make the users seems more real, it’ll help designers keep realistic ideas of users throughout the design process. It also helps to make sure we are going to the correct directions regarding the design, features, navigation, etc. Furthermore, persona helps us understand about what the users need and what kind of function that we need to implement to the product.
The process of creating a Persona
The obvious first step is to gather information and data as much as possible from different users that are from a similar background/work. Then you combine and sort them into many different categories.
The next step is for all the member to discuss together the amount of persona that will be using our product. Then we discuss about the background, personality, responsibility, pain points, and motivation for each of the persona in detail.
Finally, we imagine a scenario for these personas where they would be using our products. The reason for this is to not left out any important points that could appear only when inside their working environment.
OUR PERSONA
In our team we have decided on 2 personas, the conventional business owner and the cashier.
The first one is Jojo Tatari a conventional business owner, he would be using the Moodah POS apps for more of a business gains. Thus this persona would want better rate of transaction and data about the whole business.
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The second one is Yono Basono a cashier, she would be using the Moodah POS apps for making the actual transaction. Thus this persona would want a system that has an easy management transaction that would her make the transaction faster.
Implementation
Now we will show you the mock up from our team about the implementation of the User-Centered Design
This is the layout for the cashier while making a transaction with a customer. As you can see we’ve set up so that the cashier can browse through the selection of products available while being easily recognizable. Furthermore in the right side, by adding the plus, minus, and cross signs, the cashier will be able to scan through many order given by the customer in a small amount of time.
This next mock up is about the report shown about the cashier performance through his whole shift. This is to show the business owner how much each person have done and to get an idea about the business performance.
END
In the end, the User-Centered Design (and Persona) method are a way for us designers to think about the USERS, we will make the product based around the USERS and for the USERS.
Hopefully I’ve manage to explain about the Persona and the UCD well while giving examples from our group, Moodah, on how we used these to our advantage.
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