App Development is Like Building a House: The Design Phase
Over the years, we’ve come to think of designing and developing apps like building your dream home.
Development requires planning, designing, and building – just like a house. If you were building your dream home, you’d want to ensure you’ve thought of everything. Bringing your app idea to life is no different.
When you build a home, you hire people to help you. You need an architect to ensure your house will work for you and your family, an interior designer to make it both pretty and functional, and builders to turn those plans into reality.
You have the vision, and they have the expertise to make your dream a reality. So do we!
Over the next few weeks, we will take you through our development process – from planning to design, which is today’s topic, to launching your product and everything that follows.
Introducing: The Design Phase
“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
In our last blog, we looked at the Planning Phase and the importance of defining what your minimum viable product will do.
With your Blueprints in place, we’re ready to make your idea come to life. After determining what your MVP will do in detail, it’s finally time to visualise it. For this reason, most clients love the Design Phase – it’s often the first time they see their idea take form and their brand come to life.
So… how exactly do you design an app?
Using your Blueprints, our designers and techies will work together to produce High Fidelity mock-ups.
These High Fidelity mock-ups will illustrate every page and screen type in your app, down to the last detail. The designers and techies will ensure the user experience flows smoothly, ironing out friction points.
If you’ve ever designed a house from scratch, these mock-ups are like the 3D CAD visuals your architect produces of your home. The designs will show all the visual and typographical details exactly as they appear in the final product.
How do I give feedback?
Your feedback is a vital part of the design process and as such, it involves a lot of back and forth between yourself, our developers, and our designers.
When you have received the first iteration of your mock-ups, it’s time for you to give us your feedback. Some of our clients share these with friends or family to get external feedback.
Based on your feedback, we go on to review the designs several times.
How do you present the designs?
Your High Fidelity mock-ups will be provided to you using prototyping software. We call the finished product a High Fidelity Prototype.
This software will simulate what it will be like to use the app, so when we said bring it to life, we meant it!
How can you use your High Fidelity Prototype?
Like with your Blueprints, you can use the prototype to apply for funding and seek external investment.
The combination of Blueprints and a prototype is powerful and incredibly useful. Whether you’re showing them to potential investors or friends and family, it will help them see and understand how your idea will solve real-life problems.
Our developers will, of course, use the Blueprints and your prototype to build your app.
Do you have an idea to bring to life? We offer free consultations! Contact us today to get started.
You can read the first blog in this series, explaining the Planning Phase, here.
Next up… the Build Phase!