Raphaël: Hey, and welcome back to our series on EC's methodology. Last time we clarified some terminology around what an app is. Today we'll cover the importance of sketching out ideas before building your digital product. First things first, you'll want to come up with at least some basic designs. These could literally be just some rectangles representing screens with some basic arrows showing how people should interact with them, like a step up from napkin drawings.
As with many things, there are a few questions you should answer before you start. Specifically, we like to think of who, why, what and how. If you're at the point that you're ready to build an app, you should definitely have a who and a why, and you probably have an inkling of a what, because you've decided that you want an app of some sort. We frame the technical stuff, like how the code is written and what technologies we're gonna use as the how. But before that we need a what?
That's where design comes in. When some people think of design, they think make it pretty. But before that, we need to design features, flows and screens. Features, address a user's needs a flow, addresses the steps that lead them through that feature, and a screen allows us to identify what they need to see at each step. Having an idea of what we need to build gives us the information we need to determine how we're going to go about implementing it. This is not a one time thing.
We may have a rough idea for the long term plan for the app, but we will constantly need to design new features and update existing ones. We'd love to hear what your design process is like. Feel free to get in touch and let us know, what has worked well for you or what hasn't. We'd love to learn from your experiences as well as share our own. Follow us if you wanna keep up with this series, we have a lot more to share.
We're constantly updating our process and trying to learn from ourselves, our partners, and our community. And if you think we could work together, we'd love to hear from you about how we could partner up and help you launch your next project. See you next time.