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The path to user-centric architecture
Where do fun, useful apps come from? Teams that know their users.
A friend recently asked what to put in a document to begin a discussion about software architecture for an upcoming service offering.
It’s a sort of nebulous question really, but you have to start somewhere.
Does it need native mobile support? What’s the estimated bandwidth and storage requirement? These are reasonable questions that would inform the architecture. But I took it to mean “What do I need to know in order to architect a successful app for my users.”
Define Successful
One of the most “successful” applications I ever wrote was a seemingly boring one. A food service physical inventory program for school systems. Lots of data entry, tons of reports. Only several hundred regional schools used it in the late 80s or early 90s. But I consider it successful in the sense that users unanimously reported that it made their lives easier by improving a chronic, thankless, error-prone process.
Before writing that program (as we called apps back then), we assembled all the stakeholders in the room. Folks from all the counties that were chipping in to have the software built. The ladies with the hairnets and the spatulas literally had…
