Mobile app development

how does the purpose of an app affect the design

Hey there,

This all comes down to Requirements Engineering - it's a super interesting area to look at.

Typically, when you're making any application, especially in industry, you're doing it to solve a problem. It might be that students are having a hard time keeping track of their work, so they'd like a to-do list app to help. It might be that you're developing an application to help people find clean and safe drinking water. In any case, you should be able to think of the "Problem Statement" - the "Why" of your application.

Next up, you've got the "who" and the "how". Who is your intended user? If you're targeting university students, we can make some assumptions: our users are typically 18-25, more technically literate than the general population, and likely have an internet-enabled device. University students have to move between lectures, so it would be good to have the application be a mobile app that they can access on their phone. Internet connection may be poor, so we can elicit (gather) that our application should work without a stable internet connection.
>>> You can gather the "Who" in many different ways. If you have access to users, interview them, do workshops, etc. If you don't, you may be able to make some assumptions yourself first during the initial design/build. In most applications, we'll be targeting multiple User Personas - if our application was actually being built for a whole school to use, we may need to create a persona for Teacher, Student, Parent, etc. and understand why/how they need to use the application to inform our decisions later on. Take the time to research "Functional" and "Non-Functional" requirements.

Great - we've got a set of requirements written down. We can think about the "what" now. What are we actually building? What should the application look like? We want our application to be intuitive to use, and have good User Experience (UX), so we should design to meet our Functional and Non-Functional requirements, always keeping our "why", "who" and "how" in mind. Away from design, this is the point as a developer where you consider what technology stack you're building on - is it a Native App? is it a Progressive Web App? could a website be of use? do I need a server? what programming language should i use?
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Hope this helps - all in all, purpose defines your design. We can't force our users to use the app in a certain way, we have to design the app to be used in the way the user expects.

~ Mikael, UoP Student Rep