Project 2 – Home Alarm – App Instead of Text Communication
Business Case
A design for a home alarm had been produced. There needs to be a way for a user to communicate with it when they are away from home. People within the project thought using text was sufficient. I thought an app would be better.
My Involvement
I found out that using text messaging to communicate is a big security issue after speaking to a tech lead. He listed a number of main reasons why not to use text.
I decided to do some user testing to help validate if text communication would be difficult.
I set up a number of user testing session using an equal number of two user types, Early Tech Adopters and Technophobes. I chose a set number of typical tasks a user would perform. I set up a demo to make it feel like they were texting the alarm system as there was no working prototype at this stage.
I collated the results into a spreadsheet and presented the results in PowerPoint. The results showed people didn’t like having to remember codes to text to the system. They also thought there would be security issues. This helped persuading people that an app makes sense.
The Excel sheet below shows results of the tasks of the user testing.
From the results I put all the main findings into a presentation and explained the findings to all of the project stakeholders. I also showed that the main competitors all had apps. This influenced the project stakeholders into believing that having an app was a good idea.
So I research the data requirements and looked as the tasks users would carry out and put together workflows. I designed these workflows in Visio to show how the system could prioritise commands received i.e. if it received more than 1 command at the same time which command should be carried out and what message should be send to other users who's command wasn't carried out. I also wanted to show when the system sends a message and when the user sends a message so it was clear to all stakeholders.
From the workflows I could produce a high fidelity demo showing styles in Axure. Most of the styles already existed so to save time I used these with the demo. Where there were styles missing I either resourced a Visual Designer or I came up with the styles myself. I presented the demo back to the stakeholders for sign off ready for build.
