Droidcon India 2013

To demonstrate various aspects of usability, and how a developer can achieve high-usability without studying the theory, just by removing the major bottlenecks.

I will take a sample app which is Functionally Complete but has a lot of Usability Bottlenecks. We’ll collectively identify these bottlenecks, and I’ll iteratively remove them one by one and show how the usability of the final version of the app has improved compared to the initial one.

Outline

Usability is combination of Learnability, Efficiency, Memorability, Error handling and Satisfaction. One should focus on these aspects when building a smart app. Usability is a very important criterion which decides whether an application will click or just fade away.

The term usability implies a focus on assessing and making recommendations towards making the app smooth, responsive, consistent and optimised in memory and battery usage than it does on design. But most of our focus gets engaged in UI design to some extent, particularly design of wire-frames or other prototypes. That focus is also important but an equal amount of focus must be given to these two.

In this session you’ll learn how to solve this problem by concentrating on the basics at every stage of developing your app. We’ll focus on an app which is functionally complete but lacks good user experience. We’ll identify of the major bottlenecks with respect to performance and usability, resolve them step by step, and by the end of the session come up with a version of the same app which is lighter, faster, more usable and better looking.

Speaker bio

Garima is an Application Developer at ThoughtWorks. She has been into Android development for the last one year and has been involved in a wide variety of Android projects. She has built the android client for ‘ideaboardz.com’ which included good analysis of implementing async calls, UI and architectural decisions. Recently, she has conducted sessions as part of an Android Bootcamp and also been involved in code-jams for a local issue tracker application called Project Kranti. Also she has implemented an open source async call mechanism which can be reused easily for any app. She has also added an image recognition and social discounting feature for a shopping application, for a retail chain. She is an Android enthusiastic, always eager to explore, learn and apply something new.