Hello readers, marketing professionals, and web development aficionados! My name is Andria, and I am the Web Developer for Roadmaster Marketing.
If you’re a web developer or a marketing professional, you know how critical it is to be flexible and adapt to what your client already has in place, what they want, and what kind of budget they have available. However, you also need to take into consideration who is going to be using or viewing the things you create.
As a web developer who makes things for the automotive industry, I need to know my audience. Here in Cedar Rapids, our population is aging with the median age here being around 36 years old based on 2020 numbers. This means that half of users in Cedar Rapids will have known a life without the internet.
With that in mind, many of the things that my team and I put together for web apps and websites are a perfect balance of modern design and simple, easy to use user interfaces.
An example of this thought process came into play with a project that I’m co-developing with a mobile app development company; a little tool Roadmaster Marketing likes to call DriverGo.
DriverGo is a web/mobile app system for automotive companies to create and assign jobs to employees who drive as their primary job. It streamlines the process for tracking hours on the road and making sure that drivers are efficiently assigned to jobs that are posted.
For Roadmaster Marketing’s client McGrath Family of Dealerships, they have about 60 people who do this and many of them are retired folks who wanted a part-time job. These drivers approach the learning curve of a mobile app differently than their younger counterparts.
Alongside the drivers are the managers who will be entering in the jobs and keeping track of the drivers. Managers are busy and with their brain pulled in many different directions, mistakes can be easily made. This presented another challenge: to make the manager’s job posting portal seamless with as few steps to create a job as possible.
Surprisingly enough, it took a long time to get the DriverGo system right, considering how simple the system is. The team I was co-developing with was so used to the end user being knowledgeable in technology that we had to keep going back to the drawing board to make it user friendly enough for everyone.
As a developer, I need to meet the end user as close as I can to where they are, meaning easy to read user-interfaces, logical workflows, and resources for them to refer to if they need help. The next time you and your team work on a project, take an extra day to evaluate it from another point of view, whether it be from an older person’s point of view or the point of view of someone living with a disability. It will help you be a better developer and even though it will take a little bit more time to push live, at least you will feel good knowing that you got it done right.
As a senior member of society, I appreciate the “young pups” that keep our generation in mind while developing a program. Thank you for helping us feel like we occasionally get it!