In the second lesson of Module 5 of the Design Course from CWC+, JC talks us through identifying the needs of your target audience.
This is enabled via a data gathering exercise asking people what they need from the app, what they’re not getting from existing apps, and what they want to do with the app.
This feels more like something that you might do if you were commissioned to create an app for an organisation and, as JC states, is something that would be done by a User Experience Market Researcher.
But, that said, I can see it as being a useful exercise by way of focusing your mind when creating your own app. If you can question yourself, why you are creating the app, who for, and what the competition is, as well as perhaps identifing a general need that isn’t currently being fulfilled by apps in the App Store, then you have a focus to work on.
There does seem to be a little danger heer in that, if developing your own app, you could be so wrapped up in not creating the app that the app never gets created. In some instances, it may perhaps be preferable to create “something” and see how it goes down rather than being put off creating anything, because you may feel that your app just isn’t going to achieve your own end goals.
I discovered this in my years of writing. Being hung up on what someone else thinks can quickly turn into a block that prevents you from even starting your own project. Whereas sometimes it can be more useful to plough on with a draft and then mould it into something more useful once the basics have been handled.
Nevertheless, I found the lecture extremely interesting, in a general view, but I’m not sure how practical I would find it unless someone else was asking me to create an app for them (which seems pretty unlikely at this early stage). But, we shall see where this leads.
