Young Designers 2011

		Young Designers 2011
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Gaurang Gupta | Gaurang@gaurang.in

Designing App Development Paradigm for Office 365

Information and Interface Design | PGDPD
Guide: Dr Bibhudutta Baral
Sponsor: Microsoft India Dev.Centre, Hyderabad

Keywords
Cloud computing
App development
Sharepoint platform
User experience design

My diploma project was to design an app development paradigm for Office 365, which a Microsoft Office collaborative and productivity tool delivered through the cloud. The paradigm consists of a portal which empowers developers to develop applications for Office 365. The apps will be developed to support the product ecology of the same.

The project involves software developers as target users. The research process comprised two different stages. The first was user research. I looked for the right users and then conducted expert interviews to get some insights into behaviour. The second stage involved studying the existing apps development platforms i.e. Android, Windows phone 7 and Facebook. The results from the first phase of the research led to card sorting and categorization and thereafter, the generation of detailed personas. Based on the results of user research and competitive analysis, the portal’s content was prepared.

The entire content was framed in nodes and sub-nodes, based on the Flow & Functionality results, to the entire information architecture for the portal. Various concepts were prepared to accomplish the needs of all the personas. User responses that followed helped finalize the best communicated concept, which was then converted into a high fidelity prototype. The process was synced with user-testing.

This project gave me an opportunity to apply my learning to a professional context. It has given me the confidence to take on other projects.