Creating an app - Episode 3

What's up, everybody? Welcome to the next episode of The PW Podcast. We are on episode 3 of our series where I'm talking about creating an app and some recommended steps that you should take. Now in this one, we are gonna actually make some pictures. I know.

Right? You're like, hey. Hey. It's about about time. Trust me.

All that stuff we've done in the first two episodes is totally gonna pay off later on. So what we're gonna do now is we're gonna talk about some basic, you know, getting started designs. Now for me, I always start simple. Right? We're not even talking about colors or fonts or anything fancy like that.

For me, I will usually start one of 2 ways. I will either sit down with a pad of paper and a pencil because I just find that by doing it manually and using a pad and a pencil, not only can I, you know, sit there and play with it and use an eraser to take stuff off if I need to, but it also forces me to slow down? Now that is key to this whole thing, the whole reason I go analog here. When I have to do it and I have to slow down, this makes me think about everything I'm doing and stare at the paper longer and make better decisions than I do if I'm doing it on a screen where I can just click, boom, click, boom. Right?

Now that may not work for you. That is perfectly fine. But for me, by forcing myself to slow down and take a little time and have these drawings on pieces of paper that I can just leave around my office or whatever or my desk and look at them over time, even when I'm not working or thinking about this project, it gives me an idea of looking at it and saying, okay. Does this still work, you know, one day later, 2 days later, whatever it may be? And it's just there for me to mess with.

I don't have to screw with software. I don't have to have a particular device or anything at all other than a pencil and a paper. That is my recommendation. However, it is not uncommon that maybe I'm somewhere where I don't have that available to me. Right?

But I usually have either my iPad Well, my iPad is almost always with me. So I will use an app on my iPad and my pencil, Apple pencil and I will sketch out. Now, I use an app and I'm gonna the app that I use, they're not sponsoring this podcast. They are more than welcome to if they want to. And you can use it on multiple platforms.

But for me, I use it on my iPad. It does work on the Mac. I think it works on the iPhone, but I'm not sure. And I use an app called mock up. I will put a link in the show notes for you so you can check it out on the App Store, but that's what I use.

It is a subscription based thing, but for me, it's worth it. And basically, I what I like about it is I could just pick a template from a device and go at it. Right? Whether it's an iPhone, an Android phone, a, you know, particular screen size or a standard web size screen. I can just click a button and I've got that frame there, and I can just start start sketching with my pencil and a few tools.

Again, it's all about keeping it simple. At this stage, you don't wanna be thinking about colors. You don't wanna be thinking about fonts or any of that stuff. You wanna start thinking about the very preliminary approach to usability and what do I wanna see on this interface as far as the user using the app. Right?

That's what you're caring about here. Not how fancy it looks, but how functional it is. Again, you know, the the reason I like doing it this way is I can essentially just use my fingers and imagine me tapping on the paper or the, you know, app, whatever I'm using to design with. And I can just play around with it and see, okay, how does that feel? Right?

You know, I can zoom in and out on a screen if I need to to make it the same size as an iPhone or an iPad? And how do these controls feel to me? Does the placement feel good? Now you may nail this first time, probably not gonna. You will want to spend a few times going through this.

You're probably gonna start from scratch many times. I often do. But the key here is you are thinking about what goes on the screen at this particular stage in your application and how is the user gonna interact with it? Where are they gonna see things? Are the buttons gonna be in places that are familiar to users, like, for example, using a thumb on a phone or on the web where most people would expect to see like a menu on the top or the left hand side for the most part, those kind of things.

That's what you're looking for here. And what I want you to do is to start sketching out your idea for each of the screens on your app. Right? Even the ones that you don't think are that important, treat every single one of them as important as the other. So the main screen, maybe the onboarding screens, a settings screen, a help screen, a contact screen, whatever it may be, draw each of them out.

And then in your mind, when you've got those pictures in front of you, you can, you know, flow from one screen to another and see how that feels. If I go to the settings screen, for example, I've gotta find some way back to wherever I came from. So there's things like that. Right? And that's what you're gonna be thinking about here.

Those basic user interactions, the user experience, UX, you've heard it called many different things. It's all the same thing. Right? That's what you're caring about. So that's the takeaway from this episode is start drawing your basic, what do I need on the screen here, which screen is this, and revisit this many times.

You're gonna wanna live with these designs for quite a while, is my recommendation, before you start building something. You don't wanna start building anything until you've got a pretty solid idea of how it's gonna feel. Now I usually start with the main screen. That that's just the way my apps work is, okay, this is where people are gonna spend most of their time, and that's the one that I start with. Everything else branches off from there.

Maybe different depending on your app. So that's the approach that I've got. That's what I want you to take away from this episode. It's also gonna have you thinking about things like accessibility and things like that, which we'll talk about in a separate episode. But all of these things, you should take into account at least as a cursory kind of, you know, give it some thought and put it on paper.

Sketch it out a few times. Like I say, you're gonna start over maybe a few times. And this is also gonna tell you what's missing. What are the things that I've not thought about? Like, maybe when you were designing, you know, you were coming up with your list of features, you didn't think, oh, I need a setting screen.

Well, that's a feat. Right? And it's gonna occur to you when you realize you don't have one in your designs. So this is, again, what I'm saying about how we will revisit all the work we've done in our previous episodes. That's what I've got for you in this one.

If this has been helpful, thank you to all of those people that have reached out to me and told me how much they appreciate this series. It means the world to me that this content actually helps and means something to you. So thank you, everybody, for that. You wanna go the extra step? Go to peterwhidham.comforward/bmc and buy me a coffee.

I'd appreciate that. Thank you. Leave a review. Tell folks that that this has been helpful. Tell your friends about it.

Right? I'm I'm really thrilled with the feedback that I've got so far, and we're gonna keep pushing forward in this one to the next stage, which I think is gonna every stage is invaluable, but we are now getting to into the real heart of building our application out before we start talking about the tools and and everything else that we're gonna be using for it. That's it, folks. Hope you're having a good one. I'll speak to you in the next episode.