From brainstorm to blueprints in 3+ weeks
Get all of the technical plans you need to start coding
Our Process is Agile
After 10 years in business building enterprise and start-up platforms and learning from each project, we have continually refined our process to ensure projects are delivered on time, and within budget. We keep our clients informed throughout each stage of the development to make sure expectations are clear and met.
Step 1: Workshop
From the beginning our focus is on product/market fit starting with a strategy workshop to connect your vision to a set of product features and corresponding benefits that will align with target users.
• TARGET THE RIGHT AUDIENCE
If your audience is too broad, or too narrow, your app will likely miss the mark.
• KEEP IT LEAN
Having too many ideas and not enough clarity on what you want to achieve will produce an app bloated with features no one wants.
• ANALYZE IN WRITING
We write detailed user stories to clearly reveal who your users are and why they'll love your app.
These brainstorming sessions allow for the possibility of improving existing ideas and/or coming up with new ideas. We know we're onto something special when we end up with the unexpected.
Step 2: Blueprints
We turn the product/market analysis and user stories into a set of wireframes and technical documents (API and Data Layer) for you to approve before going into code. The blueprints are the go-to documents for our clients and developers, detailing the experience your users will have, screen by screen, and revealing exactly what we are building and why.
• LOWER YOUR DEVELOPMENT COSTS
By being able to refine concepts in wireframes, you can avoid expensive code changes later on.
• PLAN HOW YOUR APP WILL WORK UNDER THE HOOD
The API doc details the procedures, protocols and tools that will be used to build your app, showing how the backend and frontends will interact.
The other piece of the technical puzzle, a well-defined data layer, is crucial to your subsequent marketing efforts as it will define the visitor data you want to capture to better understand what your users are doing, and where improvements can be made.
A key thing to keep in mind is that while there may be thousands of happy users on thousands of frontends, there will only ever be one backend. If things aren’t well-constructed there, every single frontend will be affected.
Step 3: Design
With the Blueprints in hand, it’s time to dig into the design, creating graphics and animations and choosing color themes and typefaces to match current style/brand guidelines. We can work with your graphics team or create the graphic assets from scratch.
• MAKE THE DESIGN CONSISTENT
Good design depends on a consistent UI throughout the app where typefaces, buttons and labels look and work similarly, while also ensuring the mobile app is consistent with the website for frictionless transition.
• MAKE THE NAVIGATION SIMPLE
Users should be able to explore the app intuitively and complete all primary tasks without needing an explanation for how.
• MINIMIZE USER INPUT
Forms are best kept short with the keyboard customized for query type and field values dynamically validated.
It’s almost impossible to build the perfect app on the first attempt. Well-crafted software design is an iterative, evolving process that relies on data from a/b testing sessions and user feedback to constantly improve the experience.
Step 4: Build
Our developers turn the Blueprint and design docs into clean, maintainable code that gets thoroughly tested by our QA team before sending to you for review after each completed sprint.
• OFF TO THE RACES
We will open accounts with a few 3rd party services, for example, AWS, to host the backend servers, with the Apple and/or Google Play stores, and with other 3rd party services that your product may integrate.
• BACKEND FIRST
Until the functionality specified in the API is built, the API is just a document. Nothing much can happen on the frontends until the backend is up and running. This is why the backend is always built first.
• STAYING IN TOUCH
Via Slack and Jira, you’ll have access to everything your developers are seeing, including visibility into the QA testing process and conversations between the teams.
We use a Scrum framework in our Agile process. Scrum works well for new products as it allows flexibility when faced with the many unknowns new products involve, allowing your team to more easily adapt the product roadmap as the work proceeds.
Step 5: Deploy
When your app is ready for market, our team will create the production environment, integrating with your company’s infrastructure and uploading to the app stores, keeping you informed of each step of the submission, review and approval processes.
• CONTINUOUS INTEGRATION (CI)
We implement continuous integration for higher quality and more reliable code through risk mitigation and process consistency.
• ANALYTICS
Every application we build includes a suite of powerful analytics so you can see in real time how users interact with your app from the start, providing valuable market insight.
• SERVER MONITORING
After deployment we will continue to monitor server and app CPU, memory, network, and disk usage to make sure the tech side of things is performing optimally.
Software deployment should only take place after thorough testing to ensure that all the bugs have been found and fixed to ensure a smooth, secure rollout for mission-critical services.
Step 6: Support
We go beyond product development and satisfactory delivery by offering ongoing lifetime maintenance service for the software products we build.
• IN FOR THE LONG HAUL
Even when an app is ready for release we look at it as a beginning. We will stay with you over the long term for any revisions or updates.
• BLOCK-OF-TIME- SUPPORT CONTRACTS
We offer block-of-time support contracts to help ensure any issues that may arise are taken care of quickly when your application is live in the marketplace.
Our aim is to help you run your business smoothly by ensuring your system, website, or software product remains bug-free and up-to-date as you scale in the market.