Whether it’s a website or a product, users are the most crucial success drivers. They are the key factors determining a product’s usability and performance. While designing a product, even developers think about the use and application it’s going to have in users’ life. That speaks a lot about the significance of UX or User Experience design. Irrespective of what the product does or can do, it’s the benefits reaped by the users that matter the most!

So, what’s the general notion or thought process in this regard? Whenever we think of a product and its UX, we imagine a particular set of features that can make things easy and smooth for users. However, that’s just a part of the entire story. It is imperative to think about aspects within products which will lead to the identification of its true purpose.

That’s exactly what ‘Product Thinking’ means – identifying a product’s purpose

What does ‘product thinking’ mean?

Every developer has some objectives and goals in mind while creating a product or application. Say, for instance, the main purpose or objective behind creating the biggest cab service, Uber, is to reduce traveling hassles for commuters.

It’s here that product thinking comes into the picture. Every application or product has a core UX and its here that developers need to think when developing the products.

Why is ‘product thinking’ important?

What do you see when you book a taxi on Uber? You get real-time updates on the arrival of the vehicle along with the approximate time. These arrival updates or time schedules aren’t a part of the core UX. They are just additional features which enhance and improve the User Experience. What we get as the inference is that a product and its features share an interrelationship. The former supports the latter which is incomplete without the product.

Quite naturally, that compels developers to change their thought processes and development ideas. You need to think about the usability of a product and how it adds to the User Experience.

Here are some effective ways to strike a balance between the two:

How to engage in product thinking?

If you want to identify the importance of product thinking in UX designs, you will have to uncover the goals of the product. Try finding out its goals or the job it is expected to do. Every product meets users’ demands or fulfills a certain requirement. In other words, a product solves the user’s problems. If it fails to do so, the product loses its usability. For unmatched User Experience, developers will need to identify a product’s objectives and the problems solved by it.

1.     Identifying your target audience

Does your product cater to a particular group of people? Most of the products have their target audiences, and developers should know these audience groups. That will give you an idea of the purpose of your product.

2.     Strategy and vision

Always try to have a vision while working on product development. That will help you create and devise the right strategies. Once you achieve successful strategizing, it’s time for effective implementation.

Signing off

If you wish to improve the core UX, thinking in products will be of paramount significance. These tips will make your job a lot easier!

Chat Bots – the next big thing?

With the dramatic surge in the number of apps and ever-decreasing screen sizes, users have arrived at a crucial point of technology evolution. It’s the age of ‘OS + Apps’ paradigm, where downloading, installing, and managing applications have become tougher than ever.

In such a challenging situation, what other forms of customer interaction can replace your traditional mobile app based support system? With the saturation reached by mobile apps, which other form of communication can keep the engagement alive and yet be a cost effective solution for your company?

The answer is – Chat Bots residing within messaging applications

Messaging apps and chat bots are substituting the mobile OS big time, thus bringing a new change in the app development arena.

Chat Bots are the latest technology trend

Chat bots replacing mobile-app technologies isn’t a new affair. The tech arena has always undergone crucial transformations, and this happens to be one of them. Trends began right from the 90’s when browsers came as alternatives to desktop OS. Websites substituted client applications, and today we come across bots replacing mobile app OS.

It’s here that users witness the emergence of innumerable applications such as Line, WeChat, Telegram, Slack, and Facebook. You can interact with 3rd party services from within the application interface.

Developers have the opportunity to create messaging bots, which lay the foundation for a new and innovative trend.

How Chat Bots are like Humans:

With the ever-increasing popularity of messaging bots, users have quite a few crucial questions popping up in their minds.

What makes Chat bots so important? Let’s take a look!

• Bots can replicate human actions while writing, reading, and receiving messages
• Users can program a bot to perform automated functions
• From initiating actions to sending responses, bots can execute critical functions
• From automating functions and workflows to operations, bots can perform numerous functions.

Messaging bots have revolutionized various sectors. While e-commerce bots help you make purchases, food bots help you order food, you will also receive relevant content pieces from content bots. In a nutshell, chat bots bring us to a new age of integrated and automated operations.

They replicate human actions, and that’s what makes them special.

Chat Bots lead to effective messaging architecture:

Bots are finding applications in diverse operations. Quite naturally, this diversity in use cases leads to effective messaging architecture. Depending on the situations and requirements, messages should be re-structured. The NLP feature or Natural-Language-Processing capability of bots ensures successful human interactions.

Benefits offered by chat bots:

With the exceptional, innovative, and highly functional features of messaging bots, customer support mobile apps seem to be heading towards a farewell. Users will now have functional and interactive bots enabling effective communications and interactions.

Bots also have the opportunity to track user responses by creating customized messages. Whether it’s a simple workflow or critical transactions, bots can ensure successful mapping of these operations onto the framework.

Our final verdict!

There’s no denying the benefits offered by messaging bots. Apart from ensuring integrated operations, these Chat Bots de-clutter and revolutionize mobile experiences. Whether it’s knowing information or responding to something, bots will prove to be the best alternative to mobile app OS!

There are a lot of options these days for companies to engage with various audiences through mobile technology. As they seek to stand out from the masses, these companies are continually looking for innovative solutions that go beyond the norm, or expected, to drive interest and engagement.

That’s where GoodWorkLabs comes in. GoodWorkLabs is a leading new-age software and design lab that delivers cutting-edge products and solutions for a growing list of global clients. The firm specializes in outsourced product development, high-end mobile/gaming apps and custom software development.

Mobile app development is highly in demand these days, and many companies are emerging to meet that demand. So many, that it can be challenging for businesses to determine which offer the best, and most reliable app developers. That’s where Clutch comes in. Clutch is a Washington, DC-based analyst firm that identifies top services providers in mobile and web development. Using a proprietary framework, the Leaders Matrix, Clutch maps firms’ focus areas and ability to deliver on client expectations.

Clutch is committed to identifying the leaders in a variety of industries, such as software development, advertising and marketing, web and mobile app development and IT consulting. GoodWorkLabs is on their radar screen. The firm has been selected by Clutch as a company to provide as a “firm that delivers.”

Our profile offers potential customers a thorough summary of our services, including detailed charts showing prospective clients which industries we serve, a list of some of our clients, and a sense of what it’s like to work with us. As we move forward our profile will be augmented by the inclusion of customer testimonials to offer an even more realistic feel for what we can do.

Our name says it all: we’re GoodWorkLabs and we do good work! But don’t just take our word for it. One of the most important features of our profile is the client reviews section. What’s unique about the reviews is that Clutch actually reaches out and interviews our clients over the phone. This allows our clients to give unbiased feedback about our products and services. While this feat might make some business owners nervous, we welcome the unbiased reviews, as it’s the only way we can truly know how we’re doing. We want to constantly be evaluating and improving our services, and these interviews allow us to do that. As of right now, we have a 4.8-star rating, so we’re feeling pretty confident about our ability to meet our clients’ needs.

The client testimonials which accompany the review section are crucial in giving potential clients a glimpse into what it’s like to work with us. One of our valued clients, the CEO of Audetemi, a mobile development company said: “GoodWorkLabs did a good job of designing the user experience…I would say their attention to detail is what sets them aside. They insisted on coming up with a design of their own before discussing my ideas.”

Another client, the founder of ID Verify Wizard, a fraud prevention company, said: “One of the things that stood out for me was their level of service and approach to the customer’s need. GoodWorkLabs is focused on what has to be done.”

We couldn’t be more pleased with our profile, and our relationship with Clutch. If you haven’t already, we invite you to check out our Clutch profile, and let us know your thoughts!

The award-winning UX Design Studio at GoodWorkLabs kickstarted the internship program in 2015, where in we take few bright and innovative design students to take up interesting projects, solve real life problems and build beautiful & usable products. Megha Chawra, a B.Des student from MIT, Pune, successfully completed her internship of 5 months.

Our HR team asked about her experience working with our team and how useful was her stint here at GoodWorkLabs. Let’s read her experience penned down and shared by her.

“Goodworklabs is one of the fast UIUX growing company in Bangalore. I was a UI/UX intern for 5 months and in these months I had the great experience in learning the whole system of a Mobile and web applications from research to development and testing process.

The company follows a structured process of User experience called Lean UX. Starting from understanding the needs of the client’s product, we nail down towards research module particularly in user personas, comparing other similar apps etc. Coming up with the key priorities, we start developing the information architecture and wireframes keeping the end user in the mind. Then, while doing the visual design I learnt to explore in color schemes, layout and interaction styles, right usage of fonts.

Once the designs are done, the very most important technicalities which I learnt was to understand the requirements, challenges and work structure at the development side of the app i.e asset creation, spec infos, device and resolution sizes of both iOS and Android which we generally tend to ignore while making the visuals.

Overall, It’s a great place to learn and improvise the skills. Have developed the capability of patiently managing the needs of the clients and the developers. People over here are very friendly, supportive and fun to work with. Working here have built my confidence in digital designs.” – Megha Chawra, B. Des final year student, MIT Pune, India.

To apply for internship program at GoodWorkLabs, send in your application along with your profile and work to contact@www.goodworklabs.com

Rapid prototyping is nothing but submission of mock-up design (wireframes) about how a system should look and function upon full-fledged release. The system can be anything – a software, an app or a website. With rapid prototyping, stakeholders get a glimpse of what the fully ready design will look like and how it will behave. This will then undergo validation from leadership executive, developers, designers and other associated stakeholders.

The core purpose of this activity is to ensure that all perspectives are clearly factored in when doing actual development and thus save costs, time and effort in multiple iterations afterwards. When prototyping, you need to focus on the key/common functionality that will be used the most. Anything that is new, complex or routinely used functionality but needs security will definitely go through prototyping.

The process

The three key stages of rapid prototyping process include –

1. Prototype – is the development of sketches or simulations that mock-up the actual solution
2. Assess – this is then shared with key stakeholders for their review and feedback
3. Revise – all feedback is incorporated into the prototype and made ready for further fine tuning

As more feedback keep getting added the prototype grows in scope and assumes a full-fledged pre-development design. The term ‘Rapid’ refers to the quick time in which the mock-up goes through a series of iterations to evolve into something concrete.

Fidelity in prototyping

Fidelity refers to the amount of effort/time involved to make prototype nearer to the actual product. So, low fidelity (wireframes) will be a rough pencil sketch far removed from the actual working system (more practical in the initial iterations), while high fidelity is as realistic to actual system as it gets – by use of high end simulator tools (this will be practical when all feedback has been collected and incorporated into the prototype).

Depending on the stage at which the development happens or the end objective of the prototype, fidelity can also encompass one or more of the below dimensions of fidelity –

1.Visual fidelity – This tackles the look and feel aspect of prototyping. It can range from rough pencil sketches of the mock-up to hi-fi stylized versions. More focus should be on the UI aspect here.

Juicy Tip – Don’t go high end in the first stage itself as the mock up is bound to take shape and evolve further post gathering feedback from stakeholders. As the process progresses, you can bring in individual elements such as color, graphics, high-res images etc.

 2. Content fidelity – This tackles the way content placement will affect the overall look of the application or website.

Juicy Tip – Start off by placing dummy text (“Lorem ipsum…”) into the rough sketches just to fill up the blank space on layout. As the design keeps getting better you can replace this with actual content to gauge its impact.

 3. Behavioral fidelity – This dimension shows whether the prototype will be static or dynamic / interactive when presented to stakeholders.

Juicy Tip – Initially, keep interactivity to the minimum as focus should be on layout and visual appeal. Later on you can add elements of interactivity to make the behaviors as similar to actual system as possible. This way the subsequent iterations can be utilized for usability testing and user experience.

GoodWorkLabs specialises in User Experience (UX) for software products, mobile apps, games and enterprise products. Request for a free quote for your UX, prototyping and design needs.

The leading outsourced product development company GoodWorkLabs was featured in the anchor story in The Telegraph, the largest newspaper of the Eastern India. Here are excerpts from the story –

Start young, take risks and break out of the rut! Vishwas Mudagal did just that to have his share of ups and downs before tasting sweet success. Now, the 32-year-old entrepreneur-writer-motivation speaker wants the younger generation in the Northeast to dream big and follow its passion from college itself.

“The idea behind GoodWorkLabs was to provide high-end technology solutions to other companies. Today, we have 20 clients, including Flipkart and Samsung. About 80 per cent of our clients are based outside the country,” he said.

On what makes his firm acceptable in the global market, Mudagal said, “It’s about aesthetic sense, scalability, innovation and the ability to build a product incrementally. We believe we have acquired these traits and our clients have responded well. Not many IT service companies have in-depth knowledge of building a product, as doing that requires going through a gamut of services over a period of time.

The Northeast, he said, has a huge potential for entrepreneurship but needs to have the right momentum. “The impetus on entrepreneurship as of now is not there. There is the need for developing infrastructure and building a marketing campaign. Having said that, the region has abundant human resources. A lot of young people from the Northeast have done well in cities outside the region,” he said.

Read the complete story “Breaking Out Of The Rut Mantra For Success” Story here.

Vishwas Mudagal, CEO of GoodWorkLabs, was invited for an exclusive event by CII Young Indians Jaipur chapter to address the members and also students of ICG – IIS University at Jaipur. Vishwas address a large audience on key aspects of entrepreneurship, building path breaking products that can change the world, innovation, writing and so on, encouraging young women to dream big and take up entrepreneurship during the college time. According to him “College is the best time to experiment and understand what you are passionate about. This is when you can start your first company. Success or failure doesn’t matter, what matters is you take the first step.”

Vishwas who is also a best-selling author encouraged everyone to take up writing and storytelling, saying “The only way to live several lifespans in one lifetime is by writing stories.”

Young Indians team is doing a great job in encouraging youngsters and creating an ecosystem for entrepreneurship and business growth.

Here are a few pics from the event –

Vishwas Mudagal with CII – Young Indians leadership team – Jaipur co-chair Abhinav Bhantia, Jaipur chair Abhishek Mishra, Northern Region Chair Rohit, Ashish Maheshwari, Ashish Modi, Nivedita and everyone.

Vishwas with students of ICG College, Jaipur. The future women entrepreneurs, authors, and game changers!

The Nasscom Product Conclave 2014 Kolkata, the mega event conducted by the IT-BPO body Nasscom, was a great success and has given a push to the IT industry in Kolkata, especially the startups from the region. Vishwas Mudagal, the CEO of GoodWorklabs, spoke about Lean Startups at the event. He highlighted the growing popularity of Lean Startup philosophy, the need to build products iteratively using the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) model, acquiring ‘validating learning’, experimenting with pivots and various other tricks entrepreneurs could use while starting up or scaling companies.

Below are few pics from the event –

Vishwas Mudagal in a panel discussion on Lean Startups.

‘Losing My Religion,’ the best-selling novel written by Vishwas Mudagal was showcased at the event. It is now seen as a book that is a preamble to entrepreneurship and startups, as it exposes the reader to the life of entrepreneurs, and their struggles and glory.