Use user profiles to reinforce understanding of the single activity release 1.0 is meant to support.
Maintain focus and set expectations by distinguishing the activity the app supports from another closely-related, yet different, activity.
Ask a Project Manager about their greatest challenges and “scope creep” is sure to top the list. It’s easy to mentally expand scope to add that “one more thing”. Yet after “one more thing” is added another “just one more thing” comes up. This cycle can continue indefinately and v1.0 never arrives or arrives “late and over budget”. There are many techniques to keep this phrase from applying to your project. One is to state early what the project will not be.
This is the third entry in the Making of a Web App series. Key points are:
Write profiles of users’ roles, responsibilities, and needs
Two profiles is good, three is borderline and four profiles indicates the scope for release 1.0 is too large.
User profiles are important tools for design and scope decisions.
This series shares a process that designers, developers, and managers can use to design applications that delight users. Or, if you are a web-application user, this series can help you gain a better understanding of the workings of a software project.
Whether builder or user, I think you’ll find this series useful. If so, let me know by leaving comments below. If not, well, please also let me know by leaving complaints below. If you want to easily follow along, you can subscribe by email here.
Know Your Users
In the previous article I shared that this series’ subject app is a sales team collaboration system. This is a broad stroke description of the app’s domain. Now we need to ensure a good understanding of the users’ roles, responsibilities, and needs. We’ll do that by writing up short profiles describing fictitious people.
”Like Thoreau and the band Devo, psychology professor Schwartz provides ample evidence that we are faced with far too many choices on a daily basis, providing an illusion of a multitude of options when few honestly different ones actually exist. The conclusions Schwartz draws will be familiar to anyone who has flipped through 900 eerily similar channels of cable television only to find that nothing good is on. Whether choosing a health-care plan, choosing a college class or even buying a pair of jeans, Schwartz, drawing extensively on his own work in the social sciences, shows that a bewildering array of choices floods our exhausted brains, ultimately restricting instead of freeing us. We normally assume in America that more options (“easy fit” or “relaxed fit”?) will make us happier, but Schwartz shows the opposite is true, arguing that having all these choices actually goes so far as to erode our psychological well-being.”
It’s difficult to talk about web application design in this Making of a Web App series without first describing the application. Other designers have hidden their plans while sharing their process by offering vague design decisions and small, blurry screenshots. The results are less than satisfactory so in this series we’ll share the details of the actual application. Here it is: in Making of a Web app, we are building sales team collaboration software. Here is some context as to why.
This is Synap Software's blog on Marketing, Software Design, Small Business, Management, Technology, Productivity, and other topics of interest to new small businesses.
Scott Meade is the author and an entrepreneur, corporate refugee, father, husband, and small business owner living near Denver, CO. After a successful stint leading large, corporate IT efforts, Scott co-founded Synap Software to bring well-designed web apps to small businesses.
