Rob James posted a great article on the “top down approach” which would aid developers to work on their projects in a “holistic approach”.
Essentially the concept is that you work from the user’s perspective down, rather than thinking through the requirements to come up with the domain model, class models and the like. The reason that this is beneficial is that you focus on what the user actually requires to do, not what the system expects them to do. And that is the first step towards building systems that employ best practices in usability.
In the post he mentions the 9 steps of successful project development:
- Concept
- Brainstorming
- Paper wireframes
- UI Design “Look & Feel”
- HTML Screens
- UI Controller Layer
- Tests and stubbed service layers
- Service implementation and data layer
- Utility classes
A well written article and surely a great approach and we believe that the perfect mediator between end-user, developer, client and technology is in fact -the wireframe.