🔗Part 1: From idea to kick-off

🔗Part 2: Backlog and Interface

Introduction

In today's modern world, most people rely on dozens of mobile apps to navigate their daily lives, often without even realizing it. Take a moment to reflect on your own last day. Chances are, one of the first things you did in the morning was grab your cell phone, unlock it, or stop your alarm. From there, you likely checked your messages on WhatsApp, Viber, or Telegram, scrolled through your social media feeds, read the news, listened to music, watched YouTube or other videos, checked your email, played a game, took photos, and engaged in various other activities that we often reserve for the morning hours. All these actions are facilitated by our smartphones and the multitude of mobile apps available to us. 

We have apps that cover different aspects of our life to make it easier (sometimes it’s the opposite, but mainly easier 😊).   

The two most popular mobile markets, Google and Apple, each boast over 2 million applications available to users. Just imagine staggering number of hours the developers spent implementing them...Mobile app development has become a lucrative industry, and many people aspire to bring their own ideas to life in the form of mobile apps. it seems as though everyone has an app idea or has already published their own. In many ways, creating and publishing mobile apps has become a modern-day gold rush akin to the feverish pursuit of wealth during the California and Alaska gold rushes. While many people try, only a select few achieve significant success. 

To succeed in the mobile app development business, you must have a unique and innovative idea, flawless implementation, strategic promotion, and numerous other factors that can all play a role in shaping your success. 

At Five Systems Development, we have spent many years developing high-quality mobile apps for both our clients and for our own product line. As a mobile studio, we specialize in creating educational apps for both children and adults, as well as puzzle games and other entertainment apps. We are constantly growing the number of applications that are released under our brand. Recently, we have decided to start a series of articles to showcase the process of building a mobile app from start to finish, including what is approximate time required to spend on it and how the process is done. 

To kick off this series, we would like to introduce our latest mobile app idea: "Fitness for Kids", the best mobile app that will teach your kids to do sport exercises, motivate them to do sport and track kids' progress. 

Idea

As you may have understood from the text above, we have decided to create an app that focuses on teaching children how to maintain a healthy lifestyle through sports and exercise.  

Why did we decide to build this specific app? 

For one, we are passionate about sports and believe it is beneficial for people of all ages. Second thing, sports apps are among the most popular and widely used applications today. And the third reason is that no one has created a great fitness app for kids yet. 

Nowadays every adult has a great choice if they want to install a fitness application. While there are plenty of fitness apps for adults from famous brands like Adidas, Nike, and Under Armour, the same cannot be said for children's fitness apps. These applications help you count calories, help you to build sport programs and track their execution, etc.  

Most apps that do exist are relatively simple, poorly implemented, and not well-supported. At Five Systems Development, we always strive to create best-in-class applications, and we aim to fill this gap in the market by developing a top-tier mobile app for kids' sports and fitness. 

There’s no kid’s analogue.   

Most apps that did attempt to implement fitness application for kids are quite simple, not very well implemented and supported (sorry competitors, but it is true). Five Systems Development decided to fill the gap and create best in class mobile application for kids' sport and fitness. This is our rule in general, if we make any app our target to build best in class application, so no exception here as well. 

Our idea is to build an application for kids that will include the following functionality:

• Exercises for each body part
  
  
• Different sets of exercises
     

• • Morning exercises - simple set for 5-8 minutes that will help your kid wake up and receive energy for the day. 
    
    
  • Evening exercises - set for 10-15 minutes that will help your kid stay healthy and be in a good form.
    
    
  • Exercises for class brake - 1-3 minutes break for the class that will help kids relax their eyes, neck, back and hands.
    
    
  • Home gym - exercises that your kid can do at home, but that would replace a good gym and trainer for them.  
    
    

• • • Home for kids' gym 3-5 years  
      
      

• • • Home for kids' gym 5-8 years  
      
      

• • • Home for kids' gym 8-12 years  

o    PRO trainings for kids - exercises for kids that can do long, complicated and intensive trainings

• PRO Boys  
  
  

• PRO Girls  

o    Weight loss - exercises and program for kids that have extra weight and require sport program to become healthier and lose some extra weight.  

• Tracking of the kids’ progress and records their statistics  

As you can see, we have a lot of tasks ahead of us, and our plan involves many different steps. Our priority is to create a format for our data and prepare the necessary documentation for our designers and developers. 

Ubiquitous language and data structures

There is a perfect book called "Domain-Driven Design" by Eric Evans, which is aimed at software development teams but is also valuable for any engineering team creating something new.  

One of the book's main ideas is to create a Ubiquitous language for the team, which provides internal naming for the major concepts and components of the system being built. Sounds simple, but this is a step that many teams skip or ignore. Those who do take the time to create a Ubiquitous language, however, can understand the amount of wisdom and practical benefits that are hidden within this concept. As a team of intelligent individuals, we are committed to building such a Ubiquitous language for our project.  

So, let's start: 

• Kid - the main user of our app. We are building it for kids and expect that they will be our main consumers.
  
  
• Parent - mother or father of our user. Our app also has a lot of things for parents: description of the exercises and sets, statistics, etc
  
  
• Exercise - single exercise description, animation and sound
   
• Set - bunch of exercises grouped by some principle and algorithm
   
• Exercise complexity - one of hard, medium or easy complexity of the exercise
   
• Exercise characteristics - can be one or many of strength, speed, flexibility, endurance or agility.

These terms are used in all our documents and communication about project. We also created two tables that describe:  

1.       Exercises  

One sample exercise is described to show the way we make it.  

2.       Exercise sets  

We cannot disclose any details of sets’ description and implementation as it is our intellectual property and a unique value of our application.  

Kick-off and team structure

Now that we've determined what we want to build and how we will present our data, let's plan who will do what. The following roles are necessary for the development of our app: 

Now when we realized what we want to build and how our data is going to be presented let's plan who will do what. The following roles are necessary for the development of our app: 

• Professional sportsman (in our case the Athletic Champion of Ukraine) who will describe all the exercises and sets for us. We hired an expert with an education in sports and specific requirements for working with kids. Our expert worked with kids' group and knows which exercises can be applicable for kids and how.  
  
  

• Product manager - a person that will drive the app’s development and be responsible for its features 
  
  
• UX designer - a person that is going to develop user experience of our app, keeping in mind kids as main users 
  
  
• UI designer - a person that will make the game’s UI and styles 
  
  
• 2D Artist - a person that will create game heroes and characters 
  
  
• Unity developers - engineers that will implement the application itself  

Now we have a team structure. In our case, we grouped this team together and had a kick-off meeting where each party began to work on their own part of the content. Only the developers don't have any work for now, as they must wait for the design to be ready and participate in design reviews as consultants.  

In our next articles, we will describe how each role works and what the outcome is for each participant. 

🔗Part 2: Backlog and Interface