Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Once you've chosen how you want to build your mobile strategy, you should consider
avoiding the urge to jump right in and code something. A good developer plans out his
or her applications, whether they are native, web
-
based, or mobile web sites. This step
can be grouped under the idea of structuring your application, which we'll discuss next.
Structuring Your Application
In this section, we're going to talk about the process of designing your application from
the ground up. This takes the form of three steps, a wireframing or mockup stage, a
graphical designing phase, and a code structuring stage. Let's start by talking about
design.
Wireframing / Mockup
It can be very tempting to have an idea, and then immediately begin coding it up without
thinking about how the end product is going to look. This can be a bad idea for a
number of reasons:
It might lock you into a design that doesn't really look that good in the
end (i.e., it's too cluttered). Or you might realize that your design isn't
as efficient as it could have been if you hadn't jumped right into
creating buttons and boxes!
It might prevent you from innovating because you don't “feel like”
changing things to add new features.
It might stop you from soliciting feedback until the end of the project,
when it may be too time consuming to change things. It's easier to
show your design to users to see if they find it intuitive, and then tweak
a drawing, rather than show them an app and then recode to make the
design better.
To prevent these things, many designers create wireframe diagrams or “mockups” of
their applications. For example, a very crude mockup for a transit app like the one we
discussed earlier might look like this (Figure 4-5).
