There are certainly many ways to learn and many stories of successful people who famously did not attend or dropped out of higher education. Yet for my time and money, there is no better path to professional and intellectual growth than immersion into an environment where you are guided by industry experts through an exchange of ideas (learning is a two way conversation) and a review of existing body of knowledge (why try to start from nothing?); and then challenged to improve that body of knowledge (don’t just accept what you are taught, but challenge it as well).
That is why, if asked for advice, I continue to recommend the unique wealth of intellectual challenge and professional networking resources offered by universities.
I write this in celebration of the hooding and graduation ceremonies at the University of Denver (DU) today where I earned the degree of Master of Applied Science.
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.”
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.
