You can't ignore your users

A  note about my recent experience which made me think about Software design, User experience, apps and the users. Story also posted at Medium

Was this meant to make my life easy!?

Software in simple terms is meant to solve complex problems with simple solutions and eliminate manual processes. These days with the advent of mobile apps, our day-to-day life has become very convenient. Many of the manual work these days are being replaced with software or apps. For e.g., filling application forms, booking movie tickets, paying bills, online banking, booking doctor’s appointment etc.

Here is an experience I had recently with a software trying to replace a job being done manually. Let me set the context by first stating about the manual job which I am talking about. My company started providing cab facility for all of us employees so that we can commute to and from office with ease. They have made a deal with a cab operating company. Every time we get off the cab, we need to fill in details of our trip on a paper form and sign on it. This piece of paper is called as “Trip sheet”. Drivers give this to the cab operator. The operator in turn use this to produce invoice so that our company can pay them. This is more or less the use case of the trip sheet. As we can see, a lot of manual work is involved and the cost and time involved is high as well. There is also a risk of losing a sheet and the driver will have to go through a lot of trouble to get his payment done. Also, it is very irritating to fill in so many details, especially when you are in a hurry to get down and go!

Software to the rescue! Or is it?

Who keeps trip sheet these days? When there are software and apps for every other thing, there should be some software developed by someone to get rid of this manual work and reduce the pain. The cab operator did think in the same way and decided to introduce a mobile app for this purpose. How they shortlisted this particular app is something which I am not aware of, but they slowly started rolling out the app to the drivers. The idea was to remove paper work and maintain attendance, use GPS to track the cab movements etc. I could see that the drivers were not so happy about the app that they need to use going further, they preferred to use the traditional paper way. I started wondering why the drivers were not happy with this change. Over the next few days I could observe the following problems. Some of my observations:

1. The mobile app seemed to be not so intuitive and had complex UI. The user has to do multiple interactions just to set the attendance set for each passenger.

2. Seemed to be buggy — most of the times it failed to work. Thus, non-reliable and they had to maintain the paper trip sheet as well!

3. UX seemed to be complex, it should have been designed keeping simplicity in mind. A swipe to set an employee’s attendance followed by another swipe to set the next passenger’s attendance. Have OTP entered to make it secure~

4. Training sessions were organised for the drivers so that they could learn to use the app. Representative from the software development company was assigned to train the drivers and help them get started. The representative could not give the training in the language most of the drivers understood since the trainer was not aware of the language of the land. This made it more complex for the drivers as they could not get to know all the details of the app.

5. The app is not multi lingual. If local language was supported, it would have been self-explanatory for the drivers and they would have felt more comfortable to use it. 

(for point no 4 and 5: In a country like India where people speak many languages, giving importance to the language of the targeted audience would be ideal)

What should have made their lives easier actually made it difficult for them! This transition for the users, i.e., drivers in this context, could have been a lot smoother if some minor things were taken care. Software should ensure that it provides a great User experience, have intuitive and self-explanatory screens, have good performance. Users should love to use the software! 

Keep in mind

While designing a software always consider the use cases, understand your users, how the users would use the software and importantly collect feedback from the users and work on them to make your software the best! Be Agile and go to market early with MVP, but make sure it is not too buggy! Give enough importance to the UX right from the start and keep the UI simple and intuitive!