An approach to mobile app desing and development combining desing thinking, user experience, and iterative-incremental development

Abstract

Mobile applications have grown at an accelerated pace, closely following the technological development of mobile devices, however, on some occasions such applications do not meet customer expectations. Agile methodologies have been used in order to face the complexity in the development process, as well as cope with the changing environment and the fast delivery that themarket demands. According to the literature, one of the recurring problems is that the developers do not actually consider the real needs of the users, therefore, efforts have been made to apply hybrid development models. This paper presents a methodology proposal that integrates design thinking, user experience and iterative-incremental software development with the aim of developing competitive products that offer an adequate user experience, contemplating the user as themain axis. Themethodology involves 7 phases: empathize, define, analyze and ideate, design, prototype, evaluate and refine, which are described in detail. In addition, the article presents the results of the development of two mobile applications, the first addressed the stray dogs problem in a city, the second focuses of improving the communicative functionality of customers in a cafeteria, through the use of augmented reality. Both applications were verified through usability tests, they were also evaluated with respect to their initial requirements. The results of this research can help developers when considering a software creation alternative that improves the proposed solutions and is more user oriented.