From the course: Chief Technology Officer Career Guide

Understanding users and business case

From the course: Chief Technology Officer Career Guide

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Understanding users and business case

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- [Instructor] When planning an application, you need to know why you're building it, both from the business case and from the end user standpoint. For example, in our food business we may want to build a mobile e-commerce app so users can buy spices and cooking supplies. The business case is simple. We want to sell more products. The user case will be to have new products available. But to do it right requires having a good understanding of our users and their desires. As in this example, the business case is often the driver of why we're building the app in the first place. But it's important that as a CTO you have a really good understanding of specific goals of the app, where it will ideally lead in future versions and quite specifically what are the business drivers and who are the departmental stakeholders you need to work with to ensure that this is a success? Once you understand that, then you need to get to the user. User experience design is the process of designing the app from the user perspective. It requires that we have a decent understanding of our users and how they will use and perceive our app. UX design is a mix of art and science. If you're an existing company, you have data. You can tell so much about your audience by looking at your current users. How is your current app being used? What promotions are working and what social media posts are getting responses? Marketing likely has some demographic info about your customers. Customer service probably has even more info about where users get stuck and what they ask for. What devices are they using? What technologies? Gather what you can. Doing UX research is invaluable to making an app that works by understanding your users from the get-go. There are two main types of user research, qualitative and quantitative. Qualitative research is usually one-on-one interviews to understand the users and their journeys. It is great to know your users at this level but be careful because what one or a couple people say may not be true for all your users. Quantitative research solves for that through surveys and other techniques that get data from a larger audience. It doesn't give you nuance but can give you assurance of what a larger group thinks. There is a truism in product management that says to fall in love with the problem and not the solution. In other words, always listen to your users and don't get caught up in what you've built. It's difficult but if you can do this, you will always be building an app that people want to use. One good task is to create a few sample users to represent different users of your site and use the data from your user research. It seems silly but it can be really valuable. For example, in our food app we may have a few different personas, a single woman who doesn't have time to cook or a working dad who likes to make interesting meals for his family. You'll be surprised how helpful this can be during planning and development. Asking how Mark would like this new feature may give interesting answers and ideas. The most important first step of app development is defining who is going to get what out of your app. First and foremost is defining the business cases, what your organization hopes to gain. Then you need to plan for the user. Once you have a good understanding of them, you can get into planning the application design and user flow, which we'll discuss in the next movie.

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