In this third episode of the Creating a Software Solution series we look at the user experience.  The key to a software solution is solving a problem that needs to be addressed.  However, a solution that is not usable will likely fail.  That leads us to a focus on the user experience from the beginning of the project.  We will discuss building a foundation for the solution that will make the customers happy.

There are Many Considerations for User Experience

One of the problems most software solutions run into is a lack of detail for the user experience.  We tend to skip a lot of “common sense” areas of an application that cause us headaches when we move to testing and deployment.  These areas include things like messages, notifications, navigation, and consistency throughout the application.  When we push these decisions off it can make the final push to get a product to market difficult.  Thus, we want to build out our foundation and make our UX decisions early in the life cycle.  We can even save implementation time with some UX code snippets and controls that can be shared.  This approach avoids the need to “re-invent the wheel” every time a developer creates a new page or form.  We can even build templates to speed through these typical implementation steps.

 

This series comes from our mentoring/mastermind classes.  These classes are virtual meetings that focus on how to improve our technical skills and build our businesses.  The goals of each member vary.  However, this diversity makes for great discussions and ton of educational value every time we meet.  We hope you enjoy this series as much as we enjoy creating it.

Other classes you might consider:

Rob Broadhead

Rob is a founder of, and frequent contributor to, Develpreneur. This includes the Building Better Developers podcast. He is also a lifetime learner as a developer, designer, and manager of software solutions. Rob is the founder of RB Consulting and has managed to author a book about his family experiences and a few about becoming a better developer. In his free time, he stays busy raising five children (although they have grown into adults). When he has a chance to breathe, he is on the ice playing hockey to relax or working on his ballroom dance skills.

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