Our Appy Day
Wedding Guest App
The founder of Our Appy Day needed a centralised hub for his wedding guests coming from different parts of the country. Existing options were either limited, visually unappealing, or had a poor user experience—all at high costs. Determined to provide a better solution, he decided to create his own app. "I was disappointed with the options out there, especially as they weren’t free! So I thought why not start an app myself? I could build an app with the same concept as the existing apps, but with much improved features and UX."
Rapid Application Development
Because it was so unclear which features users would be most interested in and which features would be developed in future, we chose to use a Rapid Application Development (RAD) approach to build the app. "While there are stages within rapid application development, they should not be viewed as a rigid set of steps. It is necessary to provide some sort of framework for the process but the focus is the client and the fluency of software development rather than the model."
With RAD there is less emphasis on planning and more emphasis on adaptability & process. It involves rapid prototyping and is well suited to software driven by user interface requirements.
The benefits of developing with RAD are:
- Reactive Requirements. You develop for what the user wants, not for what you think the user wants.
- Speed. You can get a product to market a lot faster than you normally would with a traditional agile or waterfall approach.
- Cost. Less time means less money.
- Lower Risk. Less money means lower risk. You don't develop things that may never be used.
RAD requires that you have a strong test base of beta users to use your application. Thankfully, the founder volunteered the guests at his own wedding to support our approach. This allowed us to develop features rapidly and on demand. The founder spoke directly to users of the app, asked them for ideas and feedback, then we took action immediately on that information and produced an update as quickly as possible.
"I was really impressed with how quickly we were able to release something functional. I think it took around 2 weeks from the start of the development work to the first release in the App Store. We've been making improvements almost daily since, and the feedback from our beta users has been really helpful when deciding what to add to the app next! For me working with Throneware for the development was easy. Picking a name was the hard part!"