Wednesday, February 25, 2015

How to design apps for real people

Who are you designing your app for? Is it meant for people of all ages and interests, or is it meant for a very narrow niche? That's the topic Dave Wiskus addresses in the latest installment of his Better Elevation video series — what it means to design apps for human beings.

The last hundred years or so have brought us a very, very long way. From the invention of the telephone and the automobile to telephones you can use to... order an automobile, technology has empowered and enabled not just gadgets and toys, but massive changes in the way we design, create, and produce objects of every size and shape.

And there are roughly seven billion people on this planet right now. So... who is all this stuff for?

A lot of times apps seem built to provide a feature or to look a certain way, and sometimes those goals conflict with the needs of the person holding the phone, tablet, or mouse — or wearing the watch.

What Dave suggests — thinking about the human at the other end and working backwards — is a powerful exercise. Even if your app ends up the same, it's because it should be that way, not because you just wanted it to be that way.








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