Hasta La Ideas

Reporting by Yin Ho

Two of our winners apps are now available in the Windows Marketplace! For apps to qualify for World Mobile Congress promotion, they had to be in the Marketplace by February 8th. With this installment, we’ll go through Social Mints and Cash Hound’s final polishing steps to have their apps ready and certified, as well as giving a brief update of Black Belt, car pal+, and Bridge who are on a parallel development path.

The perfect, robust app may seem unachievable when faced with the time constraints our winners had. Keeping versions and updates in mind is an important facet of a development schedule. The objective is to create an excellent v.1 that can scale and grow new functionality, if added. For Cash Hound, Geof Harries and Michael Johnson’s app on cash flow management, they wrote all the features their app should have one day on a whiteboard. They then identified what was absolutely essential for a first version, and focussed on those features.

With that core functionality working, the next step is final user testing: handing the phone over to individuals to see if what the designers and developers have been aiming for is shining through. That user experience feedback gives designers a perspective on what works (e.g., if the planned route to get from point A to B is indeed the one a user takes) and what could use improvement. With that knowledge, designer/developers decide on what interface and functionality changes this version requires.

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