Today's post is written by Kiran Balijepalli, a Microsoft Technical Evangelist for Windows Phone. He has more than 16 years of global technology leadership experience in desktop, web, cloud and mobile platforms. You can find all of Kiran's Microsoft Student blogs here, and he can be found on Twitter as @KiranKBee.
In Monday’s post I walked you through the basics of learning to build apps using the Windows Phone Getting Started Guide. In today’s post I am going to highlight the top focus points to keep in mind before you start designing your app. Sometimes it is quite possible that your previous approaches to writing and publishing a Windows Phone app to the Windows Phone Store haven’t quite resulted in what you anticipated. In most cases it is always good to start with a fresh mind and attitude, call it a “Do-Over.”
Your app is your mark! It should be intuitive, highly functional and present a rich visual experience to your user. Always do thorough research of your Idea before you start working on it. Here’s a step by step guide for starting to build your app.
1. Your App Goal Statement:
- Write down a one liner on what your app does best. This is called your best-at statement. Remember, your app is your mark. The app conceptualization guidance on the Windows Phone Dev Center is good resource for a quick overview.
- Next, landscape your app. To learn more about app landscape click here.
- Write down the top three user scenarios supporting your best-at statement. While considering the scenarios make sure that you chose at least more than two user types who will be using your app.
- Create a navigation chart on how your users will get around in your App. Designing navigation early saves your app from quality pitfalls such cumbersome navigation, performance problems and unreliability etc.
2. Draw the information navigation flow chart which can lead to a meaningful navigation model. Your App is a combination of pages that exist on the navigation structure.
3. Sketch your app page navigation on a piece of paper before you touch any software tools. There are multiple ways to draw sketches, the simplest, most ideal way is a pencil and Graph paper orPowerPoint story boarding.
A Windows Phone app is a collection of pages and screens. A page is a collection of information, memorable data or links to other pages and it is in a persistent state. A screen is a general UI that does not contain any persistent state.
Learn more about app page model here.
Sketching the pages is an integral part of understanding your app’s integration point with the user.
The first step is to draw a hypothetical page structure using your page model.
Come back to the Student blog on Friday to read about the next step: design style programming & XAML