If you’ve ever been through the process of coming up with an awesome idea for a website, app, or web app, you may have taken the next step and arranged for someone to design and build it for you. If you have gone through this, then it’s quite likely that you didn’t get what you asked for, at least not in the first iteration.
This isn’t the exception, it’s almost always true; because the software design and development process is full of assumptions.
It’s also very tempting to jump from an idea straight to a sketch or prototype. When you understand the subject matter in detail, then skipping a few steps can be a productive approach. But often the subject matter isn’t understood in detail and assumptions reign rampant.
Like most things, with design and development, it’s important to understand the principle rules behind how things work so that you can break and adapt them to be most relevant to you.
To help lift the veil of secrecy around where software comes from, and how to actually make it work for you and your business or awesome start-up idea, I think it will be useful to go through a step by step approach of architecting, designing, and developing a web app.
What is a web app?
It’s an app that works in a browser. It’s like a smart website, where you can log in, create records, and integrate it with APIs to access data from other systems connected to the web. Web apps can also be wrapped up and installed as traditional smart phone or tablet apps on Apple or Android devices.
In this series of posts, I’m going to take you behind the scenes, and show you each step as I design and build a custom web app using the MEAN stack (MongoDB, Express, Angular, and Node). I’ll take you through simple methodology, and I’ll point out the origin of the different elements that the methodology uses along the way.
So, lets develop a web app:
Analyse and Identify the Problem – Part 1
Business Processes and Workflows – Part 2
Business Goals, Feasibility and Fit Gap – Part 3
Behaviour Driven Requirements – Part 4
Use cases and storyboards – Part 5
Functional Interaction Design – Part 6
Getting started with the MEAN stack – Part 7
Ooooh looking forward to this!
Thanks Joslie! Nice to have you along for the ride 🙂