This week we started our last project at The App Academy. Its a 5 week project where we need to build an app for a client that wants their idea built into an app. There are three different teams and im working with the same team as we did for the 2 week project. Our client is someone who works in the radio/music industry and wants to have an app that is a hybrid of radio station apps. The app should be able to handle live streams of music and have 8 different genres of music , have details about the station and the company, also be able to have mixtapes of music so that the user is able to choose between live streams or something else .Eventually he wants to be able to stream videos and have downloads available for the customer.
We used most of Tuesday for brainstorming. Which means that we had to decided on the features the app needs, how the app should look like and what other apps are out there with the same kind of idea and how to make this app stand out. With brainstorming there is never a right or wrong, just a lot of Post-Its which eventually had the whole wall and window filled with ideas. Once we had all our ideas we had to narrow it down to three categories: Must have, Should have, Wanna Have. We then had to move all the post its to the right category and we went on to discussing our options.
At the end we had a good idea of what type of app our client was looking for, On Wednesday we started with the sketching of the app to have some rough idea where certain things had to go, which is also known as prototype sketching. This helps us think about the flow of the app. We used Balsamiq which is a prototyping website to make a rough layout of the app and with the functionality that we wanted and to see if it really works like we expected . After the prototyping we emailed our client to ask if he agreed with the design layout and if it was what he had in mind and turned out that it was so we were happy .
We also had to make a product statement and user stories which explains step by step what the user would do when he/she pressed on a button or picture and what the user would expect to happen. Its a fun process and you learn a lot while taking these steps. We got warned about clients who want the world but as a developer you can only deliver so much in a short span of time and we had to tone down a lot of the ideas to the core basics of the app and of course if there is time we can implement some of the ideas but for now we have our work set out for us !