Part I

The beginner’s advanced guide to building an app

“The beginning is the most important part of the work.”
― Plato, The Republic

The most important part of building low cost/high-quality web, mobile and desktop applications is meticulously defining what you will build. Part I of this series will show you how to map out what you will create. The remaining parts of the guide will then walk you through the rest of process until you have an application that is ready for launch.

The formal and comprehensive method of defining what an app will do is called requirements engineering, and is made up of :

• Elicitation: gathering all the wants and needs of an app
• Analysis: reviewing each want or need for feasibility, estimation and valuation
• Modeling: making low tech and high tech prototypes of the app
• Validation: ensuring the model is consistent with the analysis and elicitation
• Management: documenting and maintaining all of the above

If you’re building software to help pilots land planes, you might follow some strict standards in all 5 of the above tasks. However, for general or business applications, we bring those activities down to two: creating User Flows and turning them into User Stories. We use different tools to draw our user flow diagrams and document our user stories.

User Flows

The first step to gathering the requirements is to walk through the app as the end user — by creating a user flow diagram. There are so many ways to create user flow diagrams, some simple, some complex. We like keep it simple, and just draw our user flow diagrams with pen and paper.

We find documenting our user flow like this gives us two benefits:

• create a rough design that gets us to start thinking about layout, and
• determine the journey the end user takes through the app.