How to Decide on a Project Idea
So imagine it. It’s project week, you need to come up with a challenging and yet doable project in the given timespan. It’s really easy to bite off more than you can chew, so what do you do? This guide is my personal thought process on how to pick a project idea that I’m both interested in and appropriately fits my time window.
First, I brainstorm ideas with a couple of questions.
Is there something I’m struggling with that could be solved with an app?
What kind of app would I like to use personally?
Is there a gap in a specific industry that needs to be addressed?
Or if it’s something that does exist, is there a more niche way to serve it up that appeals to a specific group?
For example, on my mod4 project I knew that a struggle of mine was that I’d forget to keep contact with friends unintentionally. A month or two would go by and I’d remember that I hadn’t talked to a friend of mine and now it’s awkward. So I chose to make an app to organize friend cards and memorable details about them — -birthdays, zodiac, current events in their life — -so that I could better keep up with them. This app would notify me if it’s been longer than a week since I had spoken to them.
After you find your answer, now you need to wireframe it out. What features are necessary to build out that app? I personally use trello to build out the structure into thin vertical slices, each one full feature (backend resources, frontend components and functionality, styling, and any updates to the Readme). For this specific project, I needed eight features to get the fully functional app I envisioned. Having each step with checklists on them to tic off at completion helps you visualize your project clearly and know exactly where you are in any point in the project.
If both the idea and the wireframing match with your specific timespan to work on the project, awesome! Go forth and build! Even if you have some extra stretch goals you aren’t sure you can meet, with this method you’ll still have a fully functional app without them. That’s the goal. If both of these elements don’t pan out, you can go back to your list of ideas and try wireframing one of them until you find an idea that fits.
