Creating an app - Episode 6 - Design and Accessibility

Hello, everybody. Welcome to part six of our series here on creating an application on the PW podcast. If you have been paying attention to the previous episodes, you will know that we have been in our prototype loop. If you have not listened to the previous episodes, I I strongly urge you to go listen to those. They're gonna lead you up to what we're gonna talk about in this episode, which is design and accessibility.

So now that you have a few of these prototype loops under your belt and you've sent it out to folks and they've given you some feedback because you did do all that. Right? I hope you did. It is invaluable. Trust me.

Now that you've been doing all this, now is the time to go and talk with the designers or maybe you're the designer or an external team or whoever it may be, and it's the time to start talking about those proper designs and implementing them in the application. Now treat this like you have the prototype loop. Expect that these designs will change a few times, right, as we see them in place, be it on mobile, web, or whatever platform, it is inevitable folks will wanna tweak things. So be prepared to go through this a few times. Now there are some tips here that will make life a lot easier for you.

And trust me, this is the way you wanna do this. Right? Do not put anything in line. Regardless of how you're building this application, you don't wanna have in line in your code things like colors and font settings and and all those kind of items that define how it looks. Right?

You should be putting these in one location, whether it's a resource folder or a cascading style sheet on the web or something like that. Whatever your platform of choice, it should have an option for you to create some kind of theming file system, something like that. This is the way you wanna go. Why do you wanna do that? Well, number one, by having all of those references in one location, it makes it very easy to reference them.

Right? So for example, if you're in a in a web platform, you could import a style sheet, something like that. If you're on a mobile platform, you may have an assets folder or an assets catalog, things like that. Right? And you're gonna pull them all from there.

It also means that it's very easy to update them when someone comes along and wants to make a change. Now get ready for it because that happens a lot. Something that they wanted blue today, they might want yellow tomorrow. It happens, folks. It also happens at other times, and this could happen to you.

Right? You build out the application. You design it. Everything looks great. And the next thing you know, either somebody buys the application from you.

By that, I mean, the source code or the team that you're working on or the company that you're working for is bought out by somebody else. And now you've got this rebranding that you need to do. And the last thing in the world you wanna have to do is search through all of your code to find all the places you need to change that inline code for the new branding. However, if you follow my advice here and you set up this theming system, you will only have to go to one location, change some kind of reference values or image files, And before you know it, boom, your entire app has been rebranded. Everybody's happy.

You're the savior of the day, and you can go about doing something else. Trust me. It happens way more than you think it does. Now this can be a feature. Right?

Your app may want to have multiple themes. Maybe there's some kind of purchasable unlock for different theming colors or something like that. Again, by using this theming system here, makes it very easy to implement that feature. You just create the themes. You have some kind of theme switcher.

You reference it in code, and you are done. And folks love that kind of thing. It's a great feature, by the way. So there's that. Now along with these designs, another important aspect, I'm gonna say crucial aspect in my opinion these days, is accessibility.

Let's talk about that. You should be implementing accessibility in your application while you are building it. Why? Because it's so much easier to adjust these things as you're building them. For example, you're building a button, and you need to add the accessibility feature for a voice over to say what the button is or something along those lines, some way to reference that button with some kind of accessibility feature.

By doing that while you're building it, it's a lot easier than it is to go back and do it afterwards. And it also gives your QAs and testers a chance to try it out. Accessibility is a lot easier than it used to be as far as implementing on various platforms. There's no reason not to do this. And in fact, it may be part of the contractual agreement with whoever you're building the application for, perhaps.

Right? Certainly, if it's some kind of government entity, it's very likely they're gonna wanna make sure you are accessibility compliant because nobody wants to get in trouble. And therefore, you need to be doing this because this is important as everything else that you're building. It also means that you have potentially a feature that your competitors do not have. If a competitor is not accessibility compliant or even provide those options and you do, that could very well be the difference between a user choosing your application or somebody else's.

So as important as it is to have it as part of the core application, you can also use this in some ways as a marketing feature to say, look. We're accessibility compliant, and people are gonna love that stuff. Right? There are lots of folks out there who will use particular applications because they are compatible with accessibility over sometimes better applications because they don't support it. So make sure that you put that in place.

Now we are coming to the end of the creation part of the series here. By following this episode and episode five, these two loops are primarily designed to help you create that core application and get it to that potential 1.0 first release status. So in the coming episodes, we're gonna talk about the next steps here, which is what happens when you feel like you've got an app that that is perhaps ready to go, and how do you go about improving the testing on that and thinking about things like, okay. How do I actually release this thing? What what are the steps involved there?

And potentially marketing and stuff like that. We're gonna be start to move into that part of the cycle of development here, which I hope you're excited about because that means you are reaching the end of the $1 o journey, and that is a very important milestone. There is no better milestone, I think, than when you realize I've got something. It's ready to go, and I think I can ship this. It it is such a great feeling.

So, folks, if this has been helpful, you know what to do. Leave a nice comment. Leave a nice review on the podcast episodes wherever you're listening to them. And, hey, if you wanna go that extra step, go to PeterWitham.com/bmc and buy me a coffee because, hey, this coffee helps fuel my brain and putting these episodes together for you and getting them out there. So I hope this has been helpful, folks.

I will speak to you in the next episode.