Building a meaningful App

Portrait gives you the power to build your own app — with your given data. This flexibility comes with some responsibility: Before you start integrating Portrait in to your workplace, you need to make some considerations first:

Who will be my audience, what do you want to achieve (what was not yet possible?), what data is relevant in for the use case. Lastly you’ll use want to give the app a company look, to make the overall look match your corporate design.

Audience

First we need to define who will use your app. What problem we need to solve here? What will the user expect from the app? Is the wording chosen right?

Checklist:

• Personas — Create three to five fictional personas that represents your user-base. Being able to see the app from different perspectives will help you to consider all the relevant aspects. You can find an complete write-up on how to create personas here: https://theblog.adobe.com/putting-personas-to-work-in-ux-design-what-they-are-and-why-theyre-important/

• Devices — Think of with which devices the app will be used. This matters because Portrait is a responsive app and will behave differently on each device. Consider the following the devices: Smartphone in Portrait, Tablet in Landscape and Portrait, Desktop.

• User-Stories — The audience will also define how the app will be used. Therefore treat yourself with good user-stories. A user-story explains: functionality, beneficiary, feature and with UAT you can test if the user-stories is achieved.

Information relevance

One strong argument for Portrait is, that you can source your information from different systems, applications, shares and portals. Therefore a primary target is overview.

To achieve overview we need to be very specific on what data is relevant at first sight, and what can be revealed in a detail-view.

Checklist:

• Name — What name, title or keyword will describe an information in the shortest and best-way. Everything needs a name and if it don’t have one yet, think of one.

• Keywords — Given that Portrait heavily rely on lists, we need to think of the most important keywords and if there are shown in the list-view or hidden in the detail view. Also consider what is the correct order of the keywords.

• Data-Types — You can choose if a keyword is a text, date, rich-text, and so on. This will make searches for this keywords later on easier, unlocks formatting features and gives better UX in general.

Call to actions

If necessary, use call-to-actions to jump to the origin of your information. For instance open an opportunity in an CRM if you need more details. Follow the 80/20 rule here: Most of the time, jumping to the source-app shouldn’t be necessary. Otherwise go one-step back and check your “information relevance” again.

Customize: Colors and Logos

You can, and we advise you, customize the appearance of the app. You can change:

• Logo: Always shown in the nav-menu.

• Hero image: Shown on the dashboard

• Primary colors: Throughout the app the UI has a primary-color.

A word of warning for choosing the right color: Avoid, using one exact colour from a logo or the Corporate Design. This might not work all the times because the color is too strong, too pale or whatever. Instead try to modulate it a bit: make it darker or give it less opacity.