OMA: One Month App

Technical Roles in the Design Stage

We are currently 6 days into this little venture and it appears that Aaron is doing all of the work. While this is mostly true, Nate and I do have a few responsibilities at this point.

We initially helped Aaron brainstorm and come up with the initial requirements. We basically talked through how we thought everything would work. I honestly do not really know how things are going to shape up until I start seeing some of Aaron's mockups, so we send him on his way to start creating the initial visual elements. When he gets good and ready, he will show us the mockups he has been working on. Anyone who has worked with a designer knows that this is the point where you listen to about 10 minutes worth of disclaimers before you actually get to see anything. We've actually cut those disclaimers down a bit in our recent work.

Aaron showed us the initial design mockup a few days ago. This is the point where it becomes more real for us. We can see how the user is actually going to interact with the application. This helps us identify any missing pieces as well as expand upon our existing ideas.

A less technical aspect that we all work on while reviewing the design comps is to think through the end user aspect. The end user is our ultimate concern and we each have different perspectives and identify different concerns.

We are also considering how all the technical pieces will come together. Sometimes we can make slight alterations to the design that will not affect the end user, but will save us time in development or even utilize less system resources once the application is running. This is of particular concern because we will be offering this application for free, which does not leave much in the budget for big beefy server clusters.

So to recap, this is what Nate and I have been working on:

• Brainstorming ideas
• Gathering initial requirements
• Listening to designer disclaimers - Just kidding Aaron
• Reviewing the mockups
• Usability revisons
• Initial technical design

You will be hearing more from Nate and I during the week as we start digging in to the data model designs.