Once you’re dealing with an app that has a dozen screens and hundreds of states, you can’t hold the whole product in your head like a poster. I noticed that our team was emailing around individual screens, talking about individual screens, and naming all the screens just to keep track. But we weren’t paying any attention to how the screens and features fit together.

We were thinking of the product as a set of screens. But there’s a problem with working this way: it’s not at all how people experience the product in real life. People use products in little flows that last anywhere from 30 seconds to a few minutes. […]

A product is not a set of screens — it’s the stories those screens enable.

Don’t let your homepage or primary view of your app be like a great opening chapter to a novel followed by disconnected and boring rubbish.  I think it’s time to look at my own process again and see what can be improved.

On a side note the Design Staff blog is a gold mine of a blog for designers, entrepreneurs and researchers.

• design,
• process,
• ideas,