Starting a Tech Business: A Practical Guide for Anyone Creating or Designing Applications or Software

Pulling It All Together

The right amount of design depends on your situation, but ideally you have a Product Design that paints a picture of your audience and solution and spells out some core ideas and operating principles behind the solution. Next, you will want to ensure you have a prioritized backlog of stories for your team to implement.

Chapter 3 Summary

1. Study Your Audience

The first step in formulating a good product design is painting a picture of your audience. Be as vivid as possible and keep in mind that you're not the core audience. You're working like an anthropologist to describe the audience to your implementation team.

2. Use Stories

Once you've identified and described your audience, create stories that describe how your product helps the audience members do what they want to do. Epic stories encapsulate an activity with multiple sub-activities (stories), like a play with individual acts. Use test cases to add further detail to your stories. Remember the INVEST guideline.

3. Understand the Basics of the MVC Framework

Though you don't need to become a computer programmer to do this, understanding the MVC framework will provide you a core toolset to flesh out your design and constructively engage your developers. It's best to approach the View first, then the Model, and finally the Controller.

4. Let User Stories Drive Your Views

Just as you're probably not a database designer, you're probably not a user interface designer either. Nevertheless, you ...