I've taken a couple days off from coding and I've been working on various marketing items. We're preparing for our first trade show and beta releases, which means we need a trade show booth, brochure, and updated web site. We don't expect to have any marketing/sales types around for quite some time, so it mostly falls on me.
Designing our brochure got me thinking about Techfi. The first thing I did at Techfi was to write a brochure for our first product, Portfolio 2000. Weeks before I wrote a single line of code, I had a brochure that I was showing to various people, getting feedback about the imaginary product.
During Techfi's development, the brochure kept me focused on the end result. When deciding whether to include/exclude various features, thinking about how they would look in a brochure often helped me determine whether they were worth the time to implement.
I didn't bother with a brochure this time around, mainly because I've internalized this sharp focus on the end user. And now, even more than an imaginary brochure, I focus on what the demo and user experience will be like. A big reason why the FinFolio demos have been going so well is that I've been demoing the software in my head at every step of our design process.
Another big shift we've made since Techfi is doing screen mockups before the developers write any code. That lets me show them around the office and to clients to get usability feedback without wasting developer hours. Here's the first round of mockups we did for the billing wizard:
We're using mockup software called Balsamiq. Before the mockups, we would have built the wizard and gone through (on average) two redesigns, eating up valuable developer time. Switching to mockups will probably save us 2-developer-weeks of work.
A neat thing about Balsamiq is that non-developers can use it. FinFolio's plugin architecture means our customization group can create new screens and reports for advisors. Balsamiq fills the gap between client request and developer, allowing a non-developer type to manage the relationship and work with the client to build mockups of the planned development.