Getting it Out the Door
To use the language of agile development, Dory and I in the midst of our final sprint to the finish line. We’ve got a mere 10 days left in the NYC office before both of us head back to school, but our plan is to finish the app up by Friday so we can spend our last week preparing our application for pre-release. That leaves us 5 days to have the app ready (ready, not finished)—so when we say sprint, we mean sprint!
To really milk this sprinting analogy, one thing that Dory and I have been figuring out is how to get the pacing of the design/dev hand-off right. The two of us have been working literally side-by-side all summer, but as we’ve gotten into the nuts and bolts of making the product, the big pushes in design precede the big pushes in development. So, in order to ensure everything gets done by Friday, the plan is to have the visual design ready for implementation by Tuesday (yep, tomorrow…).
We broke down this task in a couple of planning sessions with the rest of the studio. Both the design and dev tasks were distilled to user stories— sentences that describe the expected features of the product from the point of view of the individual using it. A user story might go as follows: “as a user, I want to see what songs I’ve already listened to.” From this story, I know I have to design a history page.
Besides the expected features of the product, I also have to think about the tone and feel that will package these features. Between all of these things, my design checklist for this week looks something like this:
- Color palette
- Typography
- Appearance of the “song card”
- Appearance and mechanics of the path selection
- History screen
- Search screen
- Animations
- “Language” that makes it clear what the user can do within the app without burdening the product with walkthroughs
- Branding tasks (app icon, etc.)
It’s a hefty list, but in terms of design sprints, Adam gave some great advice: rather than spending a lot of time tweaking a visual to get it just right, focus on getting the idea out the door, because more often than not an objective critic can identify what isn’t working about a design much quicker than you can if you’ve been sucked into it for too long.
If all goes according to plan (and when does it not, right!), by this time next week, our app will be tied up and in preparation for pre-release. Stay tuned!
