Designing Project Management Application to Support Developer Productivity using Goal Directed Design Approach

Abstract

Developer is one of the most important project resources to ensure software project can be finished within budget and project time limit. There were several problems that could lead to decreased developer productivity, such as distraction, lack of team awareness and miscommunication. Project management application can be utilized to help handling those problems. However, existing project management applications still have drawbacks on its interaction design, such as difficult to understand and cannot provide a broader view of project. This study aims to design of project management application using goal directed design (GDD) approach. The main goal of this study is to develop a project management application that can support developer productivity. Five phases of GDD were conducted, with end result of high-fidelity prototype that aligned with the goal of supporting developer productivity. Research was conducted using qualitative approach by interviewing 7 developers to understand users’ behavior, activity, goals, and problems. Collected data were analyzed resulting in persona, context scenario, features, usability goals and user experience goals. Achievement of the goal to support developer productivity was evaluated in the form of prototype’s usability goals, i.e., easy to use and efficient to use, and user experience goals, i.e., helpful and motivating. The result shows that prototype is easy to use with completion rate of 100% and Single Ease Question (SEQ) of 6.77 of 7, efficient to use with Time Based Efficiency (TBE) of 0.056 task/second, helpful with Intrinsic Motivation Inventory (IMI) value/usefulness of 6.63 of 7, motivating with IMI Relatedness 6.67 of 7 and IMI Perceived Competence of 6.83 of 7. Thus, the goal to support developer productivity is fulfilled as well through features and design of the prototype.