Make Planning your App a Team Project

If you're building an app that's going to involve a number of people (a business process automation app for example) it's a good idea to get everyone to help work out the app's design, right from the start. There's a great scene in the movie The Founder where the main characters are trying to design the perfect layout for a kitchen at McDonald's. After some discussion they decide to take the restaurant kitchen staff to a tennis court, draw a chalk outline of the kitchen design on the court and then have everyone go through the motions of actually working within that chalk layout. After a number of failures and redrawing of the chalk design they're finally able to find a workable layout.

You can apply the same idea to developing a prototype for an app that's going to require the coordinated actions of a number of users. First, gather information from the users as to how the work is being done currently and how they think it should work with the new app you're building. Then create a detailed mock-up of the process (a flowchart, diagram or model of some kind) and have everybody walk through it together, step by step. 

This is the point where the details that slipped through the cracks initially start to show up. "Jane is supposed to get that information from Fred on Thursday morning, but Jane's in a manager's meeting at that time on Thursday", or "Tom can't update those records at that point because he won't have all the sales data". Or maybe someone mentions that revisions are made to the payroll data occasionally after it's been sent to Carla and there's nothing in the workflow to handle a situation like that.

Changes are going to need to be made to the design of the app as it's being developed, but a "test drive" of the design during the initial planning stage can often uncover some of the biggest "oops's". There's nothing that causes greater friction between developers and users than the "WHY DIDN'T YOU TELL ME THAT IN THE FIRST PLACE?" moment. There's a good chance you can avoid some of those moments simply by doing what the McDonald brothers did in the movie - get everyone to walk through the workflow you've designed before you even begin to build the software.