This is the transcript of 'App design with Bilue' video
Yvette Poshoglian:
Are you a problem solver? Can you solve big questions and answers to real world problems using tech? You could be an app designer. Today, we are going behind the scenes here at Bilue, an app design company. And we're going to chat with Glen Jeffreys, the head of experience design at Bilue.
Yvette Poshoglian:
Glen, tell us about what you do and what you love about your work.
Glen Jeffreys:
So I'm a designer. I design digital products. So I'm usually working either in an app or a website environment. What I really love about my work is it enables me to talk to a whole range of people. I'm constantly meeting new people within new organisations and trying to understand how they work, who they are, what's important to them. And then designing products for those audiences.
Yvette Poshoglian:
We're exploring the life cycle of an app. How do you get started? How do you map out the design and what will you need for your prototype? Let's get started. Glen, tell us about your app design process, your design and development phase.
Glen Jeffreys:
The number one thing, when you are either designing or developing or doing anything in terms of creating a product is having empathy for the end user, for the audience. And that's really about going out and understanding what's important to them and how they communicate. So the start of almost every design process involves a lot of meeting and talking, workshopping and end user research. Now, sometimes that can be really quick. It can be done in a day, depending on how much time and money we've got to spend on the project. Sometimes that process can go on for weeks and months. It depends on how big it is. But number one start to any project is understand who you are designing for.
Yvette Poshoglian:
You've done your research. What's next? Glen, what happens once you've got the information you need? How do you get on board?
Glen Jeffreys:
So let's imagine we've gone out and we've spoken to say 10 or 20 different people. You've had all of these conversations and they start to tell you... In one conversation, you might get five to 10 interesting little snippets out of that conversation. You start to group them all together. You put all of your little snippets together of the people you've spoken to and you'll start to notice patterns, repetition in what people are telling you. They all want a certain thing or they're behaving in a certain way. You start to see the patterns in the data, and these are what we call findings.
Glen Jeffreys:
So identifying those findings is really important. And it can be as simple as saying, look out of the 10 people we spoke to eight said, they'd really love an app that played podcasts to them in the morning. That's a finding and we can design around that finding. And you come up with a hierarchy of needs out of your research. So from our research, we now know that our users really value A, B and C. So let's design to solve the problem of A, first. Then if we can solve B and C, brilliant. It starts to show you a pathway for prototyping.
Yvette Poshoglian:
Glen, tell us about your prototyping process.
Glen Jeffreys:
So I think the most important thing is to start simple. You can start with just pen and paper. You're sketching out the rough steps of your prototype. So screen by screen, just decide this is going to happen on this screen. Then this happens and then something after that. Don't worry too much about detail at that stage. Once you've got your whole journey mapped out, you then start to add the interface.
Glen Jeffreys:
So you can say, okay, here, we're going to show a video. This is a home screen. Once I click on this particular part of the interface, it will launch something else. Or I might go into a chat window at this point. So you can start to put those pieces into your prototype. Now, moving from paper, you can move into a digital prototyping environment. So Sketch or Figma there's many on the market that you can use. And you can start to create a digital design of what you are prototyping. This can have movement, this can have interaction. It takes you to a point where you've got a clickable, moveable prototype that can be put on people's phones and put into the hands of end users. And this is user testing.
Yvette Poshoglian:
With the user testing, you're going to get that feedback, I guess. So how do you incorporate that feedback into your prototyping?
Glen Jeffreys:
The user feedback is absolutely critical to the design process. So often it's where people are using your ideas using your prototype, but they're not following the script. They're just doing what they think is logical at certain key steps. So if a user gets stuck at a certain point or gets confused at a certain point, it's great user testing feedback. You know that you need to go back and look at that part of your prototype and make it clearer, or describe the steps a little bit more, or maybe change the interface so that they can complete the task. So it's iterative design step by step to the point where you know, you've got a fully tested working prototype.
Yvette Poshoglian:
Do you think you might need to mock up a couple of prototypes before you're taking your app to the market? Let's hear from Glen now about that reality point, once you've prototyped, how do you get it onto the app store Glen?
Glen Jeffreys:
Yeah, once it's prototyped and we've got user testing, it will go into a final user interface design stage. That's often where we're working with our coders to make sure that all of the interface elements can be coded correctly, that work within the correct guidelines for the app that we're trying to produce. Once the user interface design is signed off and we're happy with, it goes into a front end development or coding stage. So that's taking all of the elements of the app, almost like the puzzle pieces that you've created and individually coding them into a cohesive app. There can often be what's called backend development as well. And that's making sure that if there is say, you're doing a music app, it might need some service to push the music to that app on a regular basis. So a streaming service might be streaming music all the way through.
Glen Jeffreys:
So it's linking up the front end code and the back end code all the way through. Once the coding is complete, we test. This is called quality assurance. We're very big on testing because there are a lot of different mobile phones. They're all different sizes and widths and shapes. So we need to make sure that all of the elements that we've coded up actually display and work well across all of those mobile phones. Once testing is signed off, we submit it to the app store and it's an internal review process. This is to make sure that our code is okay, that the app isn't breaking any guidelines, that if there are say chat features in the app, that there's safety protocols around those chat features, all sorts of things. So companies like Apple go to great lengths to make sure that only quality apps get through onto the app store in the end. This can take about two weeks, after two weeks, your app is given approval and it is available on the app store.
Yvette Poshoglian:
Glen, we're going to hit you up for one last piece of advice for all our budding designers out there. What's your one piece of advice to get started?
Glen Jeffreys:
I guess my one piece of advice is start designing. Grab a piece of paper and a pen and start sketching out your ideas. You don't actually need any software to become a designer. You can start iterating and testing and experimenting from day one. The thing that we really value in design is curiosity, and a willingness to iterate and try and solve problems.
Yvette Poshoglian:
Are you as inspired as I am after hearing Glen's incredible insider information about app design. Don't forget, you can watch this video over and over again. You can also read the T4L Kids magazine, which unpacks lots of the ideas that Glen's covered. We want you to get your video into us. Don't forget to make your pictures powerful as you can be. And don't forget, get appy.
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