How to develop an app, get 7K visitors and be on the news in less than 3 weeks
If you read my last post, you would know I participated in a hackathon organised by the BBC for this year’s 100 women season.
We(Bunmi,Ola and I) won the hackathon and spent 3 weeks in November developing a Facebook app for the series editors at the BBC.
Handy links before we dive in:
-Story of the app: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-38180363
-Our interview for the Impact programme on BBC World News: http://bit.ly/2hWxsIY
-Launch the app here: http://bit.ly/iam100women
A few lessons learned while developing a web app over 3 weeks with a full time job:
Don’t make your users think too much
I use social media everyday.However, it was a completely different ballgame developing an application for social media.Being a developer is not the same as being a user.Remember, when you have your developer hat on you make many assumptions.
“Obviously everyone will know that is a button!” said Simi (before our user feedback survey indicated otherwise)
Let’s admit it.We are all lazy.We want information fast.As a user,you want things to be obvious.You want to know what you are signing up for and you want to know what does what.Cue User Testing.
User Testing to a developer is like Google Maps to a driver in a new city.Without it you are going nowhere(or just round in circles)!
User testing was a critical phase of the project.We got so much useful feedback which shaped the final end product.Fantastic user experience is always down to iterative testing and development.
A “Jack of all trades” mentality will never work within a development team under a tight deadline
We are all developers so we all wrote code.However, we had special roles to oversee certain elements of the software development lifecycle.I was Project Manager,Bunmi was User Experience lead and Ola was Technical Architect.
Focusing on different parts of the project whilst still all being heavily involved in the development process definitely worked in our favour.
Writing tests isn’t glamorous but someone’s got to do it
I wrote tests.I wrote tests.Did I say I wrote tests?
Writing tests is critical.I rewrote so many functions just so they could be tested properly.Test driven development has never been so key!It isn’t glamorous but it definitely made me more comfortable releasing the app because we couldn’t deploy unless all tests passed.
I finally got the chance to work with the javascript testing frameworks I’ve never go the chance to play with-chai,mocha and jasmine.(FYI, I’m a java girl).
Learning how to work remotely is essential
We only met up 3 times over the 3 weeks .Yes you read right.
3 times.
I’ve worked on projects where I never met the people I was working with.However, only being able to work on this in the evenings and on weekends with minimal face to face interaction was a real feat!For a few days, we were all on different continents with crazy time difference- but we made it work!
Do not waste your money on analytics-you’ve got Facebook
There are 1.7 billion people on Facebook- just incase you didn’t know!
Having a web app registered on Facebook opens you up to the opportunity to capture powerful insights about your user activity:age,gender,education,country,language (just to name a few-when a user is logged in to Facebook while using your app).
When a user is not logged in, you can also capture user engagement across devices-showing you the most popular way users launch your app.
If you’ve ever thought about how to capture interesting user engagement analytics, consider it https://developers.facebook.com/products/analytics
Do not give up
There were many sleepless nights involved and there were moments it looked like we were never going to finish.Despite this, we chose to keep going.In the end,it was worth it.
