App Design — The Importance of Contextual Research
You’ve already pitched your product concept to x number investors and secured a decent amount of funds that you wanna spend for the development. You set the timeline; 2 months including design + development. Aren’t you excited…
to design and launch this app for consumers? If that is the case then what pattern are you going to follow? How are you going to cater your target user group? Let’s assume…
the fact that you’ve decided to go with Android first as per your market (not user) research. To find such answers, you must conduct USER research (not MARKET) research; especially contextual research. When you…
go for contextual research you will observe, how users will always perform the actions what’s there right in front of their screen. And they miss out additional options inside more or hidden menu. Once can say,
“how stupid this user is and this moron doesn’t understand how to perform some basic tasks on Android.” But, you know what! You’re completely wrong because you failed to understand such users’ pain points and goals to achieve — they can’t even figure out how to send a photograph to someone using WhatsApp. And…
they fail to send a photograph. Let’s say last month you’ve gifted a new Android smartphone to your dad on his 52 birthday. It was a family get together at your place and you took a lot of photographs from your dad’s phone. While leaving for work, you asked, “Hey Dad! Can you WhatsApp those photos to me?” What will be…
your dad’s mental model in this scenario and how will he able to perform that task using WhatsApp or the Gallery app? Why does it happen and why such users face difficulties while performing a basic function? The answer to “WHY” lies inside one of the user research methods; contextual research. By doing…
contextual research, you can find a lot of insights about an actual user such as:
- How one performs a task
- Does he understand some of the technical terms when a screen pops up?
- Does she understand what are drawer menus, hamburger navigation, or even a shortcut like how to select the entire line of text on a smartphone?
- How does he sign up for a new account?
- What does she do if she forgets an account’s password?
- How does he access Android’s settings screen, by using the pull-down menu or by going to the settings app from the home screen?
- Does she understand even Google Lollipop’s “Priority” feature?
…and many more.
Such user observation insights can help you “what to include” and “what not to” while building an app for such real users. Now…
you will say, “This user group will not gonna use my app just because it’s based on Material design; it has to be simple & intuitive.” And then…
you can see the difference “after interacting with the actual user” and “before building your final product.” Let’s say…
you want to design a real estate app for brokers. There are so many apps available as your competitors. How will you beat them and be the #1 app for real estate? Doing a marketing research, insights, or big data?No! Use the…
same research methods and talk to 20–30 real estate agents at their place and try to study what are some of the real estate apps they are using and find out the major problems they face using the apps. In fact, try to understand…
- What are their primary goals?
- Do they want x number of properties or more contacts of real estate brokers?
- What about the privacy? Do they want to protect both their properties and contact numbers?
- When do they use such real estate apps, in the morning, evening or post lunch time?
- What sort of problems are they facing while viewing some of the properties listed by other real estate apps?
- How much time do they spend on those apps?
- Try to understand their mental model; what are the steps they follow after opening their favorite app?
- Try and check what other apps do they have on their smartphone?
If they get a new call from a client (broker/individual), remember how do they save his contacts; by name, location, or other attributes.
and so on…
If you can’t spend time with users in the beginning, no matter how much you spend with digital marketing, SEO or TV commercial, and asking users to download the app, the rate of downloads will go higher but not the user engagement. This is…
one of the major problems faced by those startups having good vision, idea and funds but always fail in the long run. So how much time do you spend with your end users? Share your experience…