Cairo University

Faculty of Graduate Studies for Statistical Research

Department of Computer and Information Sciences

Software Processes
Lec. 3 outline: You’ll find all the information you need here on
Requirements for Our MVP, Education Platform MVP and Features,
User-Centered Designm Design Journey, Personas and User Stories,
Types of Design, Design Process— Malu’s story
..., and so on..
Tarek Aly
01126182476
http://41.32.221.109:8080/DrTarekAly.htm
E-mail: tarekmmmmt@{pg.cu.edu.eg; egyptpost.org; gmail.com; yahoo.com}
 Requirements: Minimum Viable
Product (MVP)
 If we think about it, we will almost
immediately define the needed
requirements:
 It must have wheels.
 It must have a board.
 It must have some sort of mechanism that unifies
the board and the wheels together.
 It must move using the wheels attached to the
board.
 It must have a brake mechanism.
 These are indispensable requirements.
Without these our skateboard is not a
skateboard. Then you can define some
nice-to-have features, like beautiful design
of the board, ergonomics, jumping capacity,
electrical motor, whatever.
Software Processes
 Engineering: The Team Around
the Product
 Engineering: is about creativity, innovation,
technology, and processes. Even Wikipedia knows
this: Engineering is the creative application of
science, mathematical methods, and empirical
evidence to the innovation, design, construction, and
maintenance of structures, machines, materials,
devices, systems, processes, and organizations.
 That is why it is really important to have a technical
person with you. Let’s, for example, think of the
roadmap for the MVP skateboard.
 Build wheels: 2 weeks
 Build board: 1 week
 Attach wheels to the board: 3 weeks
 Attach the braking mechanism: 2 weeks
 Test: 2 weeks

Software Processes
The agenda for the kick-off
meeting
 The description of the project (10 minutes)
 Why are we doing this? (5 minutes)
 Discussion of requirements (5 minutes)
 Discussion of dependencies (e.g., technological needs or third-
parties dependencies) (10 minutes)
 Timeline and roadmap (15 minutes)
 Roles and responsibilities (10 minutes)
 Questions and answers (10 minutes)

Remember, every project is very unique and requires different

approaches to be kicked off.

Software Processes
 Agenda
 Requirements, Commitment, and Deadlines
 Requirements for Our MVP
 Education Platform MVP
 Features for the Education Platform MVP
 User-Centered Design
 Design Journey
 Personas and User Stories
 Types of Design
 Design Process— Malu’s story
 Designing Our Online Education Platform

Software Processes
Remember: Requirements,
Commitment, and Deadlines
 Commitment means dedication to the project and to the product,
and that is one of the foundations for their success. It means
loyalty to the team members. (Dedication, devotion, loyalty,
responsibility, charge… )
 If at least one team member has the feeling of, “I am just doing this
task and going home,” instead of, “This is my project and I am
totally accountable for,” then the project will not be fully successful.
 They would try to achieve the committed milestone no matter what.
They would help each other not only with project-related tasks but
also by making coffee, bringing food, and taking care of some
personal issues. These teams would become best friends during
the stormy weather and ever after.

Software Processes
Remember: Requirements,
Commitment, and Deadlines Cont.
 The whole team is responsible. Each and every team member
holds the ownership of the project. It is very important to pass on
this idea during the very first kick-off meeting. Make everyone
accountable, make everyone feel important, and make everyone
an indispensable part of the mechanism of success.
 A very simple way of making everyone feel their responsibility is to
ask about their opinion a lot and using the word “we” or “us” when
it comes to success and word “I” or “me” when it comes to a
failure.
 Achieved milestones must be celebrated with the whole team.
 If there is money involved, whoever pays this money would be
interested in knowing the project’s important delivery milestones.

Software Processes
Remember: Requirements,
Commitment, and Deadlines Cont.
 Ideas come from lots of places. From every department and every
function. Mostly from clients, customers, people working closely on
the product and other similar product.
 Most important thing is validating ideas! This is the least expensive
time to think of whether your idea will work or not. Prototype it
quickly as possible, test it, and, even better, sell it!
 If they impact the KPI we are working on positively, within the
quarter, then they are put on a fast track and prototyped in the
quickest way possible to test. Failing often and failing fast has
worked the best for me in most cases.
 You need to define the high-level requirements, product roadmap,
different important milestones, and deadlines.

Software Processes
Remember: Requirements,
Commitment, and Deadlines Cont.
 Don’t let anyone feel that important decisions are being made
without considering their opinion. Don’t leave anyone behind.
Everyone should feel their impact and their importance in the
project. Everyone should feel that they are driving the project to its
very success. Then inevitably there will be one.
 You definitely don’t want to be the only one responsible for these
important bootstrapping artifacts. Define the key people and
brainstorm with them.
 Grab someone who has business understanding, some technical
person, and, if applicable, someone responsible from the client’s
side.
 Have you heard of focused and diffuse modes of thinking
(Brainstorming sessions)

Software Processes
Requirements for Our MVP
 When thinking about the MVP, we need to understand the environment
and the target. To make it a little clearer, let’s do this small exercise:
A. Are there any other similar products in the market? (unique selling
point (USP))
B. What’s the target audience? Is it for a specific niche market?
C. Do I need to have some sort of breakthrough feature to convince
people to choose my product?
D. How long am I allowed to develop the product until it’s out?
E. Do I depend on external parties? For example, do I need some sort of
certification or license to start selling my product?
The first rule of thumb when thinking about the MVP is: keep it simple and
concise.
We are not only competing against other companies but also competing against - We want to
build a new one where the first versions will not offer the same number of features.

Software Processes
Education Platform MVP
We are splitting the features into logical blocks that will match
applications sections such as:

A. Pre-login: login and registration

B. Courses view: the list of courses the user can enroll
C. Dashboard view: the list of courses the user is doing
D. Course view: before enrolling
E. Course view: after enrolling
F. Profile view: edit user information

Software Processes
Features for the Education
Platform MVP

Software Processes
Features for the Education
Platform MVP Cont.

Software Processes
Features for the Education
Platform MVP Cont.

Software Processes
User-Centered Design
 UCD is the most difficult stages of product development: its design. A
designer is a person who connects all the dots. Designers link the
business needs and the product requirements to the technical
challenges and, most important, to the end user.
 A good design is about the people, their needs and problems, and ways
of addressing the needs and solving the problem. The right design puts
its user in the center of attention.
 It does not teach about how to be a designer but rather gives some
insights about driving the design process with the user as the center of
attention.
 If you don’t believe us, check the book called Creative Confidence
(https://www.creativeconfidence.com/). This book written by the
creators of d.school (https://dschool.stanford.edu/) explains why you
are creative and how to be confident in your creativity.

Software Processes
Design Journey—Its Start and
End
 It is a journey without a destination, because ideally it never ends! After
the actual implementation you want to keep your users engaged, you
want to receive their constant feedback, and you want them to love
your product. For that you have to constantly give this love back to
them.
 Think about your messaging app.
 Might be a little piece of very simple design makes us, its users, spend
more time looking at it than we would if this feedback did not exist. You
can find these small things everywhere, in nearly everything. These
kinds of things are impossible to think of in the very beginning when
you just have a slight idea of your product.

Software Processes
Message’s three dots feedback when
someone is typing a message to you

Software Processes
Personas and User Stories
 Your product will always solve some problem, but this problem is not
common to everyone in the world. It will solve some specific problem for
some specific group of people.

For example, if you create a product that helps pregnant women to keep
track of their weight, then you can immediately narrow down your user
base to females in a very special condition that is being pregnant. You
have to keep in mind as well the way your persona uses the devices on
which your software product is supposed to run. For example, people of
different age ranges use technology in different ways. The same applies to
different professions.

 What are user stories? User stories are stories that help designers to
identify their personas and create a special bond with them.

Software Processes
Alex Baggins’ Persona

Software Processes
Types of Design
 It gets more complex; it is not only about form, colors, typography, and
positioning. It is about the user and about the user’s experience. It is
about the speed of providing the user the information they need. It is
about the amount of data that surrounds us. We live in a big data era and
the art of pointing your user in the right direction is the current big design
challenge.
 The simple term “web design” has been split into a large tag cloud of
terms and concepts. You might have heard some of them: UX design, UI
design, interaction design (ID), animation design, information architecture
design, etc.
 The way the user feels about your application is defined by the user
experience design, and the way the user interacts with your application is
defined by the interaction design. The way the interface is built is defined
by the user interface design.

Software Processes
Types of Design Cont.
 Of course, all these areas intersect, overlap, mix, and combine altogether
by offering you a unique flavor of a smooth and nice user journey.
 An external company specialized in UX design was hired to run through
the user research and help to define the perfect interface for the user
journey.
 There are lots of other examples of the websites with poor UI yet great
UX. For example, Hackernews (https://news.ycombinator.com/), Reddit
(https://www.reddit.com/), Craigslist (https://craigslist.org/)
 (https://www.invisionapp.com/)

Vim is a very nice

text editor for
programmers.

Software Processes
Select one of the prototypes after
scrolling

Software Processes
Great UI and Great UX All Togethe
 You can find lots of products out there that have a great UI and great UX
all together.
 Google drive, for example, looks nice, feels nice, and works nice.
 Twitter is another example that looks nice and is quite intuitive to use.
 Facebook and Instagram are great examples of something that is not only nice-looking
and easy to use, but also so contagious. They made their UX to absorb millions of
people and spend their time in useless infinite scroll. That is amazing and scary at the
same time.

 The questions differ in their nature. So, the UI designer will be concerned
with questions like:
 What colors should I use?
 What fonts should I use?
 What is the corporate identity?

Software Processes
Design Process—How Designers
Run It - Malu’s story
1. Personas and User stories:
Malu usually starts with
personas and user stories. She
recommends creating up to
three personas and writing the
most important user stories on
paper.
2. Information architecture: “A
good information architecture
ensures that your design is
logically grouped and
interrelated.” An example of
information architecture of the
Instagram application by Malu

Software Processes
Design Process—How Designers
Run It - Malu’s story Cont.
3. Sketching: After thinking of the information architecture, Malu draws
some shapes on paper

Software Processes
Design Process—How Designers
Run It - Malu’s story Cont.
4. Wireframes:
 What needs are the most important?
 What contents and functions should be in the page?
 Do the elements make sense?
 Is anything important missing on the page?
 Does anything make the user confused?
 How can we build connections between pages?

5. Prototype: After the wireframe, we need to test whether our design

works. Malu’s process is to upload her sketch file into Invision and
make a quick clickable prototype.

6. Visual design: “Wireframes are approved. Yeah! We can start with

the visual design! Wait a second before creating the visual design. I will
advise you to get more inspirations. It’s helpful to get a sense of the
style for your product.
Software Processes
Design Process—How Designers
Run It - Malu’s story Cont.
7. Higher fidelity prototype :
 Everyone likes motion design and animation.
 Tools that can be used for designing high fidelity prototype and Animations

8. Handover: After all the testing and brainstorming, Malu organizes

her sketch files as well as other design files and hands them over to the
developers’ team. Let’s code!

Software Processes
Designing Our Online Education
Platform: Initial Brainstorming
 After the intense
brainstorming, we
have drawn these
sketches on
paper.

Initial brainstorming mockups for the

online educational platform

Software Processes
Designing Our Online Education
Platform: Initial Brainstorming Cont.

Ideas for the Future Implementations

Software Processes
Designing Our Online Education
Platform: Wireframes
 It is a schematic or
blueprint that is
useful for helping
you, your
programmers and
designers think and
communicate about
the structure of the
software or website
you're building

Wireframes of the
online courses
platform

Software Processes
Designing Our Online Education
Platform: Usability Testing
 How do you run user tests? You give your prototype to the
users, tell them what they need to achieve, and see how they
can achieve it. You can film their facial expressions, write down
what they say, and spot all the problems and possible solutions.
 How do you know how many users you should run your
research with? The logical answer would be “the more users the
better!”
The ratio between the number of test
users and usability problems found
Another very important thing that is clear
from this chart is that it is better to test with
one user than with no users at all. With one
test user you can find up to 31% of
usability problems! This is one-third of
the problems of your product.
Software Processes
Designing Our Online Education
Platform: Usability Testing Cont.
Usability
Testing of
Different
Pages

Software Processes
Designing Our Online Education
Platform: Visual Design
 Now we are talking about the UI with its colors, borders,
button sizes, and other visual elements. At this point, we are
not going to introduce colors, fonts, button sizes, or other
elements of design system, because this is part of the
corporate identity, and we don’t have any corporation; we are
just building our MVP.

Visual design
for the Login
and
Registration
page

Software Processes
Interview With a Product
Designer

https://youtu.be/WSEdKyOuat4.
Might Not work however there are a lot are similar!

Software Processes
Thank You

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