How To Make Sure That Your Product Is Ready For Software Development

Bringing any digital product into being is a complex process. Nevertheless, as software developers, we often meet clients who believe that properly written code can solve any problem and is the Holy Grail of building a product. The truth is; however, that code itself lies on the foundation of thorough preparations and includes a lot of stages and processes.

There are situations when a client approaches us after a failed attempt to build their application with other developers. Those other developers may convince customers that the proposal is perfectly complete, but in the end, they turn out to be unable to deliver the expected results exactly because they don't have a full statement of work.

The Importance Of User Experience Design

Based on hundreds of meetings, I find that one of the most overlooked parts of software development is user experience design. Sometimes, when we start talking about it with clients, they do not take it seriously since they believe that these conversations should be held with designers, not with software developers.

As a result of neglect of UX, I often meet clients who have only the idea of an application with a couple of vaguely described features. They see no more than 20% to 30% of their future product and believe it to be enough to start developing it.

UX is an important part of our process. Before writing code, developers need to know what exactly they are working on. I think it's particularly important to base solutions on specifications defined during user research and by the product team.

So, what needs to be done from the point of view of the design team prior to starting the code production per se? There are a few important prerequisites that can be combined into a sort of checklist.

Specify Target Audiences

It's next to impossible to develop a high-quality, sought-after product without knowing who is going to use it. Every function of your product should solve some problem a user has or help them with achieving their goals. It's necessary to define crucial features and extract non-functional requirements based on key user needs.

You can turn to the persona method (putting yourself in the shoes of your users) in order to systemize what you know about the target audience. It requires building personas for each user type of your product according to preliminary conducted user research. A persona usually consists of approximate age and income, location, lifestyle and goals that they want to achieve by using the product.

Defining your users helps with your empathy and understanding toward them. For instance, if we assume that your target audience lives in the U.S., they are very likely to use a two- to three-year-old iPhone. Does this impact what solutions you should employ while developing software? Yes, it does.

Define User Needs

When you know who you are developing your product for, you can better and more broadly understand what they may need from it. I like to use the user story method to describe functional requirements. User stories are a universal language that helps to efficiently convey to everyone on the team—from analysts to coders—what the product should do.

You can use the following format to craft a user story: "As a [role description], I want [capability], so that [received benefit]." In one sentence, it explains who your target audience is, what they should be able to do with your app and which benefits it should give them.

Describe MVP

Now that you understand what exact user needs your app is going to address, you can precisely describe the minimal viable product. The description should be short and clear, like an elevator pitch, and include a definition of the customers, the value of your solution and how it differs from competitors.

Make sure to also mention expected business outcomes and how you are going to measure them. In the end, define criteria for assessment of implementation correctness. Developers need to understand what results are expected from their work and be able to imagine the final product.

Make And Test Prototypes

When the key functions and target platform for your app are defined, it's time to convert them into simple black, gray and white wireframes linked together into a clickable prototype covering all user stories. The prototype is necessary to evaluate your ideas about the product and validate its functionality through usability testing.

It's much cheaper and faster to make sure that everything works properly during the prototype stage rather than when the app is released. During this stage, the team can identify all sorts of issues, from misleading button labels to holes in user flows.

As a result, you end up with the assurance that the product is going to work well and there will be no need to redevelop it again later. Besides, it's much easier to explain to software developers what you expect from them with a prototype. It saves a lot of time and money. When prototyping is completed, usually the stage of visual design starts, which defines how the interface of the product is going to look.

There's one more thing that you should know in order to successfully design your product. Before starting the UX process, it's crucial to determine prerequisites and your company's definition of complete for each step of this journey. To avoid any mess, you need to know what exactly is necessary to kickstart each phase and what outcomes you should get at the end of them.

It doesn't matter if you have your own developers team or you are outsourcing it; without this preliminary UX design work, I have found that no software development proposal can be as efficient as it needs to be and deliver optimal results.

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Article resource:https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinesscouncil/2023/04/11/how-to-make-sure-that-your-product-is-ready-for-software-development/?sh=232066b74dd3