Greenfield Applications Flashcards
UX Quickstart
Our UX and business analyst teams collaborate with you to document and visualize project needs to get buy-in and alignment from stakeholders, developers, and investors. Make significant progress in a few short days with rapid visualization and epic-level specification.
UI - Unique and compelling design
Toolbox’s UI design team works with your product team to create a unique look and feel for your application - separating you from your competitors, and establishing a brand that can be utilized for powerful marketing.
Dev: 0-1
Rapidly develop a proof of concept to validate your idea from alpha and beta testing to Minimum Viable Product and continued enhancement
Dev: experience
Benefit from hundreds of other platforms and dozens of product teams. Toolbox has been developing applications for over a decade, working with hundreds of developers and dozens of teams. We have learned best practices.
Dev: Discover the right technology
Discover the right technology. Choosing the best development platform requires investigation and experience. We present options, validate assumptions and definite technical standards and architecture to ensure your startup is on a pathway to success.
Ops: Establish best practices
A highly effective team dramatically improves chances of long-term success. Toolbox assists our partners in the ongoing efforts to effectively manage your product and team through Agile leadership consulting and ongoing support for product management.
Ops: Get your project organized
We can assist you in effectively managing your product and team. As a new company, establishing best practices and an effective team improves your chances of success.
Dev: Why we start from the UX and work backward
Why we work from UX/UI backward - feeding into UX quickstart conversation:
We have a different way of looking at product and the clients that approach it from this direction spend less money and get products faster and are happier with the long-term vision than people that start pumping out features if that makes sense.
We normally work from the UX/UI backward because if we can really nail that piece down it makes everything easier - from making dev cheaper bc you know exactly what you’re building to what kind of database info you need to be able to build out really good requirements - it really just ensures that when it comes to development, everything rolls downhill.
And I get excited when I talk to companies like yours because if you do this right, like 2 years from now, the delta between doing it wrong and doing it right is not just like 10%, it’s like 300% difference and we base this on, we’ve just watched a lot of people go in both directions over the years - So some of this is philosophical, but a lot of it is very tactical.
So, our whole theme is ‘making the complex more engaging and simple’ Our whole theme is ‘making the complex more engaging and simple’ and obviously that’s a big part of what we actually produce as far as applications but it’s also a big part of our process.
When I bring up the first step in user experience, getting clarity around what you’re actually making, what its going to look like, is fundamental, even if the UI doesn’t really matter to your end client - having well-specified wireframes and UX will bring total clarity to you and your team and ultimately the dev team, hopefully, us, so what we do first is called a UX quickstart.
A collaborative Workshop where we’ll work together with you and/or your subject matter expert to visually diagram what this application needs to look like and that’s generally a fixed scope thing so it’s very clear what we’re delivering there. Once we have that, then you have a lot of clarity around how deep this development goes, where the APIs need to be, how the database needs to be structured, we’ll unpack a lot and hopefully educate you along the way -
first off, we never want to build anything you don’t need and I feel like clients that aren’t disciplined on the UX side always build things they don’t need, they incur what we call technical debt, I’m just about making this fast and simple and giving you an MVP and once we have time to walk you through our process you’ll understand philosophically now we approach it.
Story
Been around for 15 years, we are used to working hand in hand with stakeholders like you to unpack what you’re going to need, what you clients are going to need in designing that out and then deciding what the development and implementation looks like and of course we can assist with that -
A lot of times ppl want to bring that in-house eventually - depending on what your business goals are - we’re definitely a lot of times a good team to start with bc we can set up all the architecture, get everything under way, and get you sat up for best practices, then you can choose to continue to work with us or eventually you can have your own database admin or whatever your goals are with that
Ppl come to us normally bc they’re trying to create a really pleasing marketing experience or for an application - because we work on both of those sides we have a strong empathy for our clients and what makes them successful in their clients eyes and its a little bit different for everyone - and that’s our job to help you unpack.
3-pronged approach
3-pronged project, all looks like one thing
Back-end data base, architecture, API integrations which is the biggest meat of this application
Application interface itself, like what are you and your clients going to be using and how’s that going to be interacting with the database
Then on the very front-end is that UX design - it’s probably the lightest part of the application in terms of actual work but probably pretty important up-front for you has been our experience
We normally work from the ux/ui backwards because if we can really nail that down it makes everything easier, it makes dev cheaper bc you know exactly what you’re building, what kind of database info you need, your able to build out really good requirements, so we kind of work backwards from that ux - hand in hand - helps make sure everything when it comes to development roll down hill.
Dashboard (UX) - an application that’s going to be client facing
What I can show you easily is examples of products Ui examples, may not be perfectly correlated but I guarantee you’ll sees tuff in there and be like, yea that’s what I want my product to look like even if a dashboard isn’t 100% necessary for you..
It’s definitely the sexiest part of an application like this and it does sell well, it works great with presentations and trade shows and what you really want to do is communicate the value of what’s going on in the back end in the front end and what’s nice about very simple data visualizations is that right off the bat people get it and they’re like that’s what I want, that’s going to make my life 100% easier, I can see the business value in this.
Agile methodology
Agile methodology - when it comes to dev, once we get into it, you’re getting product all the time, it’s not like we disappear for 3 months, we’re shipping product every 2 weeks so you can see it unfold and what’s really good at a company at your stage is that you don’t know what you don’t know until you see it - until you see it, you really won’t know, you’ll only make educated guesses
