Plans for 9 Tap
Today we're starting the plans with 9 Tap. Way back in Jan, when we first took over the project, I took one look at the app and realized it was UGLY. SO UGLY. But it's Win Forms, so what can we do? Noting said the people around me, it's just Win Forms, they're hideous.
So I did what any artist and designer would do and promptly refused to believe them. We may not be able to change the actual FORMS easily (more on that later, I'm researching that bit), but what are all these buttons doing on there? Why is that in an insane place that is not user friendly at all? Why is that button even THERE?
Turns out the previous devs were throwing buttons on there for testing purposes and never put them in any sane arrangement. Just stuck a button on and left it there. WHY? WHY??? Because devs (and I love them, they make things go when I can't, but really, we need to work on aesthetics, people). Luckily I had another artist in the class, so she and I and my trusty assistant Georg took to the whiteboard to see if we could make some sense out of the mess of buttons.
The design we were working with was literally a home menu page, a member data entry screen and a member scores entry screen, with the buttons opening other forms or print dialogs. No real sense made of the buttons, like I said above, they were just put there. So we decided to break things out a bit more. Move some info to the tournaments screen, make a new form just for printing various reports, and streamline a lot of the buttons. Here are our initial wireframes:
We went through a few iterations, then realized that redesigning would mean a HUGE refactor of the code. HUGE. Classes were non-existent, at least not in any useable way. They were written for each form instead of the app as a whole, which caused a hell of a lot of problems when we need the same info on two different screens. Sometimes they were included inside the form code, which yes, I know is ok, but is it really a good practice?
Basically what it boiled down to is there was no design planning when this app was first conceived. One of the things I learned whenI was in the AF is that planning and preparation makes the final work go smoothly. We planned the fuck out of the operations I worked on, taking into account all our resources, possible problems that would crop up, just really going through and thinking about how it would be done BEFORE we put the work into building plans that affected people's lives. It taught me a lot about how the design process works, and I used those techniques in art school and still do today. My process kind of distilled down this:
1. Plan
2. Make a new plan because clearly the previous plan was dumb and won't work, were you drunk?
3. Argue new plan with other people
4. Tweak plan
5. Argue tweaks
6. Make a prototype
7. Argue the merits of the prototype
8. Back to planning!
9. Repeat 1-8 a few more times
10. MAKE THE THING
11. Test
12. Repeat 1-11 to fix bugs
And on, and on, and on....
What does this have to do with 9 Tap? Eh, I'm working on stages 6-7. I'm wireframing again, this time properly, not just on the whiteboard. After that I'm going to create a new branch of the project and start mocking it up in Visual Studio, so I can get a good idea of how it'll actually look in the real world. After that, start working on architecting some of the code, figuring out what we'll need for moving buttons, how it's all going to work. I have a firm end date of the end of June, since the new class of devs will be taking over in July.
