UX project for a Business Solution for Small and Medium scale Enterprises
This project was conceptualised in mid-2012 to build a user experience for a business solution that would appeal to the small and medium sized enterprises. A lot of technological developments have happened since and so has the user behaviour and interaction with respect to online systems evolved.
The key guiding principles were -
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Intuitive: To minimise the need for a user to refer to external or any documentation to use the system. To let every element of a screen be communicative enough as goes the idiom - 'A picture is worth a thousand words'
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Goal oriented: To draw the user into performing actions while looking at a screen so as to help achieve his/her goal.
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Democratic: Easy built in mechanisms to communicate, provide feedback, get help from fellow team members, community, paid external contractors. Key focus being to 'get the work-at-hand done' and not grapple with complex support tools.
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True mass-appeal: Not only support for l10n, i18n but address accessibility to the maximum possible.
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On the move: Working on the move should be possible with very little effort, hence this translates into support for multi-screen support.
These principles are generic enough and valid even now and can be interpreted and adapted to the present context.
Disclaimer: The team that worked on the initial release had no qualification in UX design principles and have created the first cut purely based on past customer interactions, external inspirations and their own intuition.