TheAppLabb and Toronto Public Library Join Forces to Get Kids Excited About Apps

TORONTO, March 22 - On a rainy Wednesday afternoon during March break, TheAppLabb CEO Kundan Joshi presented a workshop to a full room of kids and teens at the North York Central branch of the Toronto Public Library, giving them a rundown of the basics of app creation and development on March 16. Drawing on his own experiences as a startup founder, Joshi encouraged the attendees to dream big, telling them “Startup CEOs say, ‘let me do it’ when faced with a problem instead of waiting for someone else to solve it.”

Covering all the steps involved in creating great apps, from idea to design to development and beyond, Joshi gave attendees a thorough overview of what goes into making an app. The first step is to have an idea, but that idea must also solve a human or business problem and fill an existing market gap. He also stressed the importance of getting your app idea validated by your intended target users, telling attendees to “Talk to the people you’re going to help” in order to build apps people will love and use. User validation should be followed by competition research and market validation. He referred to ‘The Lean Startup’ as the most important book every startup founder should read. He also spoke of the importance of getting involved in the startup community through meetups, conferences, hackathons and incubators to meet, brainstorm with and gain inspiration from peers. Product strategy was then covered, as Joshi challenged the attendees to “Create a story around your users” by focusing on product roadmap, minimum viable product strategy and scalability before diving into business strategy, where revenue models, user acquisition model, finding funding and building a team were discussed.

From there, Joshi jumped into the fun stuff — deciding how you want your app to look and feel. The attendees learned how much user experience matters, including how to define the audience profile and perform UX analysis. Joshi detailed the key components of information architecture, wireframe design, low fidelity prototyping and user feedback and how they work together to create a functional, comfortable user experience. He then continued with UI design and the importance of brand development, including an overview of how to determine guidelines for brand, perception and tone before creating the design. Joshi addressed visual assessment and again stressed the importance of listening to user feedback to create an app people want to look at and use. He asked the audience to explore UX and design tools like Balsamiq, Axure, Invision and Adobe Creative Suite.

Next, Joshi broke down the work involved in building the app, beginning with architecture. He talked about how the first steps are to perform a technical requirements analysis as well as an infrastructure analysis before mapping out the various architectures — front end, back end, web services and database. Next comes the actual development, including front & back end, web services & API development, integration, unit testing and iterative release management. After the quality assurance phase, where you perform manual, automated and usability testing, you’re ready to go live! He mentioned resources for learning programming languages such as Khan Academy, Coursera, Bitmaker labs and Lighthouse labs

Attendees learned even after they’ve procured a live server, registered to app stores and deployed server side application to the live server, ongoing maintenance is necessary to keep app user happy. Maintenance includes product roadmap execution, ongoing user & stakeholder feedback, analytics, tweaks based on OS updates, issue resolution and server maintenance to keep the app functional and people using it. Finally, Joshi showed the attendees how to promote the finished product by targeting audience characteristics and focusing on early adopters. Using channels such as Facebook & Twitter Ads, search optimization & marketing, online display ads, retargeting, social engagement and influencer outreach, they can keep building their user base.

Following the presentation, Joshi expertly answered all the questions attendees could throw at him including what software is best for wireframing, where to learn the programming languages essential to mobile app development, what languages are the next big thing in app creation, and more. Joshi ended the one-hour workshop on an inspirational note, telling attendees “Imagination is the key to innovation."

For more information or to book TheAppLabb CEO Kundan Joshi for a speaking engagement, please contact us at info@theapplabb.com or 416-745-3164.