For the master plan calculator app, I certainly took a more tactical approach to the design. Since I have minimal experience in mobile app development, I wanted to make sure that I was aiming for a viable product yet a solid baseline to continue to build on. One of the most beneficial aspects of developing I learned over the summer with the Strategies team at Sasaki was that building a modular foundation sets up a great baseline to build more complex functionality down the road.
The tactical approach is not the typical way that I develop projects. Considering I am a designer by trade, one of the pitfalls I find myself in is very quickly designing an elegant-looking, interactive mock-up that is far more complex to build than my capabilities allow. Hence, in the ideation of mobile app projects, I tended to incorporate functionality and user interfaces that don't exist on the IOS platform or take an extensive amount of time to develop. With that in mind, I wanted to focus heavily on creating an app that functions properly and is relatively modular in its programming to be used as the foundation to build upon and keep the app's aesthetics clean and straightforward.
The portion of the app I would like to optimize is the 'if else' loops accessing the ranges I made for the average construction costs. This is a portion of the app that I would ideally like to build more complexities into. Additionally, while providing a list of projects that fall within that price range, it would be great to allow the user to select the region they are designing and adjust the price according to regional material costs.
Now that I have a much better understanding of how mobile apps are developed, I would like to build more complexity to my MVP baseline. After going through this process at least once, I feel equipped to outline a more robust MVP. Creating an MVP list when I had no concept of achievability was quite a difficult task for me. This project and course have really helped me ground some of my ideas for mobile app development and development in general. As a designer, it is always tempting to start drawing and incorporating many different interactions, functions, and user experiences that are not very realistic for timeline, my own or my team's capabilities, or for the platform itself (i.e., radio buttons and checkboxes for an IOS app).