How We Designed the LC Waikiki Mobile App? — E.3: Scope, Planning, Analysis
In the previous section, I explained the concept, prototype and approval process. I added link below for who want to read.
If you have noticed, we have not yet fully passed the design step. Preliminary preparation is essential for a proper design process. If you start the project without making any preliminary preparation, thinking that the caravan will sail on the road, and starting the project without determining the scope and planning, that caravan will be very upset along the way.
Especially in projects with time constraints, planning is so much important.
What should we cover?
We made our presentation and got our approval for the design concept. Now we can start working; but to what? Although our concept has been approved, it is not the final designs and we have a delivery time ahead of us. It is not possible to implement everything in our minds in this delivery period.
That’s why we decided to define a scope and divide the application into phases. In the first phase, we included ideas that we can take action quickly and successfully implement.
We’ve removed the goofy ideas directly from the first phase. :)
Since we changed the existing experience, user satisfaction, which we knew would drop if we put some crazy ideas on top of it, could hit the bottom. It was therefore logical to take a particular risk at the outset and then segment the risk by partially modifying a habitual experience in the next steps.
Pre-departure preparations
Preparing the caravan on the road means managing with whatever is left at the end of the job. It is not possible for the caravan to complete that route without knowing the load you will carry, without knowing how many people are required to carry that load, without determining the logistical support of those people such as feeding, etc.
That’s why we came up with a work plan down to the smallest detail. When will the design analyzes be made, which pages will be designed in what time period, software analyzes will be written, delivered to the developers, when the developers will open them for testing, when will the content teams prepare the visuals for the content… We planned everything week by week. We have the entire project calendar.
Did we stick to this plan 100%?
The answer is simple; we didn’t stay. :)
We have been quite successful, in fact, we do not miss the delivery date very much.
The Hidden Heroes: Analysts and Tester!
Let’s give their credit, perhaps the people who are behind in such projects are analysts and testers. Generally, people think just designers and developers made a project. But in real life, this is not true.
Let’s face it, designers and developers are weirdos. Generally, they imagine what they do and when they speak they think everyone understood them. But this is not true either. I think this is one of the reasons why designers and programmers can’t get along.
At this point, analysts and testers acting as a bridge across designers and developers. For example, when designing this project, they brought dozens of scenarios that we did not even think of and asked for their designs. Dozens of error notifications, notifications of text boxes, active and inactive button situations and so on.
They also wrote and shared the analyzes of the designs made on this with the developers and actively followed them during the development process. I personally do not want to deal with designers and developers at the same time.
Now we will finally move on to the design phase. In the next post I will explain the process of homepage design.
Thanks for reading.
