With our Fast Track to the Mobile App winners, there are two parallel lines of development: those who are working with Microsoft developers, and those who are doing their own implementation/development. In this installment, we'll take you through this initial phase of taking the app from concept to reality, highlighting steps that anyone interested in designing and implementing an app would take, and give you some background on what the winners are doing specifically.
Contestants were asked to submit up to five screens and a description of the proposed app, with the option of adding supporting documentation such as a video or presentation. Starting with a strong conceptual and design foundation for the app, the next step for existing or potential developers is to build out to a workable prototype. This might translate to different actions depending on the circumstances.
For Social Mints, Pratik Kothari's app provides business users the ability to monitor social media mentions of their brand, interests or other pertinent topics (e.g., customer service), that meant considering the judges' feedback on the use of 'Mint' and the visualization choices. In response, he bolstered the metaphor by clearly tying each keyword to a mint; he considered different visualization patterns, and settled on one that he felt would most clearly display the data. To think through the app's interactions, Kothari created wireframes to map out the user experience of the app; these then contributed to the creation of any remaining screens. He's at a point where he can look at the different cloud-based services that allow for Social Mints to fetch real-time data from various social media sites.
Geof Harries and Michael Johnson, the designer and developer behind Cash Hound, a business cash flow management app that quickly determines how specific costs can impact your bottom line, moved towards building a workable prototype by focusing on the back-end first. Their app was formerly named Rhythmatic. When the winning team found an existing iPhone app with the same name. Even though the app had a completely different usage (rhythm/music gaming), they chose to change their app name to Cash Hound in order to avoid confusion and allow for freedom to develop the business app on different platforms. The core functional concepts will remain the same, but the visual design (colors and textures) will change a bit.
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