Challenge
Gathering business requirements for complex applications can be a time consuming and expensive process.
The common approach is to gather the business stakeholders into a room and work through the creation of a set of wireframes to define the user experience. This yields a general but often very limited understanding of the user experience that is then passed over to developers to build prototypes. The turnaround time between requirement creation and a prototype that can be demonstrated can take weeks or months.
It is unlikely that this will be a one and done process. Frequently, several iterations of this prototyping approach are required to build a user experience that is acceptable to the business stakeholders. This inevitably introduces substantial cost and time into the requirement gathering process.
Another issue with this approach is that it puts pressure on the requirements gathering process to “complete” quickly so that the actual application can be developed. This increases the business risk that the requirements are incomplete, and that the production application may not deliver the full business value.
As the requirements gathering phase continues, these “prototypes” also have a tendency to drift into being the “production” systems, but may lack scalable architecture, security, or other operational considerations.
Solution
The ideal solution to this problem is to use a tool that enables the stakeholders to build the actual user experience in real-time during the business stakeholder meetings. This enables the business stakeholders to immediately interact with the user experience they are trying to define.
Dynamic application prototyping eliminates both the cost and time required to create prototypes from static wireframes. It also reduces the number of iterations required to build consensus on a stable set of user experience business requirements, significantly reducing time to value.
Practical Implementation
The trellispark platform is a “pageless” approach to building applications that enables non-technical business stakeholders to configure a user experience without the need to create any custom code pages.
This is an ideal tool for creating prototypes of complex applications during requirements gathering workshops with business stakeholders. It is easy to add/change forms and fields for complex scenarios including considerations of different user roles and changes in the lifecycle of records (something not possible with many no code / low code tools). The trellispark platform is also robust and scalable so that you can simply push your requirements into production. And trellispark can be deployed to on-premises infrastructure or managed in the cloud.
You can download a free version of trellispark from the greatideaz.com portal to prototype your next application.