Interviews and User Persona

Recall that you work as a freelance UX/UI Designer to offer clients wireframe designs that are based on UX/UI fundamentals and both Android and Apple UI guidelines. Previously, you were approached with three user stories from different clients’ mobile app design requests and you selected one of the following to design for (or proposed an alternate option).

As a healthy food consumer, I want to use my phone to scan the barcode of a food product and see a graphic of all its ingredients. The graphic will rank how healthy the ingredients are for my body, illustrated in categories of red (unhealthy), yellow (neutral), and green (healthy), so that I can make healthy shopping decisions for my family.

As a concerned family member, I want to receive a notification if my relative, who has dementia, walks more than 1,000 steps from home or leaves the stove on for more than 60 minutes so that I can check on their safety.

As a grower, I want to view a dashboard that informs me of the moisture content and nitrogen level in the soil at each of my trees so that I can easily target water use and track nitrogen levels.

You have already explored the goals of the project and conducted background research to better understand how other mobile apps have achieved similar UI/UX functions. Now you will conduct interviews with potential users for your app. You will also describe the target audience for your app and develop two user personas.

Apps designed for everyone struggle to prioritize features. Start with an audience you consider to be potential early adopters and conduct interviews of 3–4 people you identify as potential customers. You may include coworkers, family, and friends, if you believe they could be potential customers. Interviews may take place via email, phone, or video calls, or in person.

Prompt

Specifically, you must address the following rubric criteria:

Determine appropriate topics to discuss in the interview. The interview should be unstructured but centered around a primary goal that you write and share with participants. Before the interview, prepare by creating an agenda that identifies a plan of 3–4 main topics to discuss. Then, write simple and neutral open-ended questions to address each of these topics in the interview. You can adapt the questions as needed to better understand user story needs and priorities during the interview, but you should have a list of questions to guide you. Examples of guiding questions include:

Why would an app like this be important to you?

How do you currently meet the need this app would provide?

What would you like to see in an app designed to help with this?

Conduct interviews to collect relevant user information. Each interview should last approximately 30 minutes and should cover the primary topics you selected during the planning stages. Take comprehensive notes of the answers you receive so you can reference them later.

Analyze the information gathered from the interviews. It is important to take time to understand the responses you receive during an interview so you can better shape the products you will be making. Consider the following in your analysis:

What issues were mentioned that you had not considered beforehand?

What patterns or themes arose?

What keywords were mentioned most often?

What user priorities can be identified?

Explain who the target audience is for your mobile app design. Based on the information you have gathered in the interviews of potential early adopters of your app, summarize your target audience in terms of demographics and how you believe the users will engage with your app. Explain who the users are likely to be and their major needs and goals. You might include the following:

Personal information: What age group, type of education, or income level is expected of the target audience?

Profession information: What is their work background?

Purpose for engaging: What are their needs, interests, and goals, and what type of information do they desire?

User environment and context: When do users engage? Where? On what types of devices? How much time will they likely spend on the app?

Develop two user personas that illustrate the goals and approaches of the app’s potential users. Remember that the goal of personas is not to represent all audiences or address all needs, but instead to focus on the major needs of the most important user groups. Using the information outlined in your target audience analysis, construct two personas that represent the main users for your app. Include the following:

Goals and tasks the users are trying to complete using the app

Physical, social, and technological environments in which they use the app

Apply personalized elements to your user personas. Your two user personas need to be goal-oriented but should also include relevant identifying information about the users, such as major responsibilities, job titles, and demographics such as age, education, and family status. Add personalized elements such as a fictional name, casual pictures representing that user group, and a quote that sums up what matters most to the persona as it relates to your mobile app UI design.

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Soil Sampling Application
Fatima Zohra Benkhouaja
SNHU
CS 319
10/30/2022
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Soil Sampling Application
Project purpose and goals
Smartphone innovations have currently penetrated each aspect of modern life. Their high
utilization and access rates today develop an ever-increasing potential for the creation of
smartphones that behave like high-performing gadgets/tools in various industries. Traditionally,
people have utilized smartphones as point-of-care testing tools in third-world nations; now, they
can extend this approach to farming (Golicz et al., 2020). This project involves designing an
efficient smartphone application that check the soil’s nitrogen and moisture levels. The
application uses the mobile phone as a portable reflectometer that relates test strip colors to the
concentration of certain nutrients inside the soil, such as nitrogen. It also informs a user of the
soil’s moisture quantity based on weather patterns and various grid samples. The app’s soil
analysis agrees with the general approaches used to determine Nitrate-N concentration and uses
Quantofix® test strips to analyze the soil’s qualities, such as texture.
Usability and user experience of eKonomics
eKonomics is a nutrient management application which enables customized agricultural
advice for ideal nutrient management. One can access the most reliable data and examination
instruments from any place at any time. It has four calculators that assist a user in maximizing
their ROI. The first calculator is called the Nutrient Removal Calculator, whose function is
calculating the crop nutrient removal of potassium, phosphorous, and, most importantly, nitrogen
for a huge list of field crops. The Growing Degree Days calculator gives climate-based
calculation that analyzes heat accumulation and assists with predicting outcomes like an
approximate date a crop will mature. The Rainfall Tracker tool is a unique feature that enables a
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user to track historical and current precipitation. The Nutrient ROI calculator incorporates spatial
variation to cover most crops in North America (Hopkins, 2022).
Usability and user experience of Farm Water Advisor
This innovation from Yara North America provides a solution to irrigation issues. It
allows for accurate irrigation scheduling without costly hardware, now freely offered to
California advisors and growers. The application gives farmers advice on where, when, and how
much they should irrigate for the coming week, enabling them to fine-tune their harvests. It also
advises on the best schedule for optimum yields (Hopkins, 2022). The app utilizes various data
ranges, such as field-specific weather information as well as irrigation and soil system data, to
provide hyper-local weather forecasts.
Users
Both apps appear to be targeting individuals in the agricultural industry. They were
designed to help maximize one’s farming investments and give them better insight into nutrient
management. Children would not be interested in using these apps. However, the elderly, older
adults or young adults would successfully use these apps if they are interested in developing their
farming techniques. The apps slightly target North American farmers. Farm Water Advisor is
freely offered to California agriculturalists, while eKonomics’ Nutrient ROI calculator covers
most crops in North America.
The project’s soil sampling application is meant to assist agricultural workers with realtime soil sample data. The app’s user experience and usability are efficient enough to make a user
rely on it during working hours. It is safe and easy to use since all a farmer has to do is launch
the application, and the screen is filled with all the resources a farmer needs to make their
irrigation decisions. The app is also effective and efficient. It has all the information specific to a
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user’s needs. The application’s graphics are highly navigable, making it easy to learn, even for
people who do not use smartphones. Once someone uses it for a few hours, it is difficult to forget
how it works. The app boosts social engagement since users can easily communicate and share
information with their peers. It is also designed to be emotionally engaging as one can see their
land’s health from a fresh perspective, especially the soil’s nutrients that keep their crops alive to
earn them a living.
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References
Golicz, K., Hallett, S., Sakrabani, R., & Ghosh, J. (2020). Adapting smartphone app used in
water testing, for soil nutrient analysis. Computers and Electronics in Agriculture, 175.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compag.2020.105532
Hopkins, M. (2022, October 13). Best Agriculture Apps for 2022 (update). CropLife. Retrieved
October 31, 2022, from https://www.croplife.com/editorial/matt-hopkins/best-agricultureapps/#slide=88915-81611-7
Hopkins, M. (2022, October 13). Best Agriculture Apps for 2022 (update). CropLife. Retrieved
October 31, 2022, from https://www.croplife.com/editorial/matt-hopkins/best-agricultureapps/#slide=88915-81611-12