 Making a Plan Custom apps can transform how you do business by addressing unique problems and user needs in your company. And you're the perfect person to create exactly what you need. You could create just about anything. So how do you decide where to start? In this video, you'll learn some techniques for planning your app. You'll learn a four-step process that identifies your goals and keeps you focused. First, you'll work with users to list bottlenecks and pain points in your existing workflow. Then you'll select a single goal with high impact to focus on. Next, you'll use a formula called a problem statement to describe your goal. Finally, you'll use your problem statements to list the features your app needs. Let's start with listing your pain points. For this course, imagine you're the office manager for a physical therapy clinic. Brainstorm with your team about their daily work. Guide the brainstorming session by asking these questions. Who's the person or group of people involved in each task? What do they need to accomplish? What's the pain point associated with that task? Your team will come up with a lot of ideas. Put them all on the list so you can assess each one. You might hear things like these. Clients have to wait while office staff figures out which physical therapists are available. Physical therapists hand write notes about client visits and their services. Physical therapists are often rushed and don't fill out forms completely. Office staff have to re-key the forms as they're turned in. Reports take too long to create and are error prone. Next, we'll choose one of the pain points to focus on. You'll often hear variations on a theme or about related problems that can be solved with a single solution. To stay focused, choose one pain point from the list to start with. It helps to start with something easy to fix that can make a clear difference in one workflow. After you choose one problem to tackle, the next step is to write a problem statement. That's a formula you can use to describe the problem you're solving. It helps you stay focused as you build your custom app. The statement includes information about what you're designing, who you're designing it for, what they'll do with the app, and what benefit will result from your solution. Here's the overall problem statement to help you address the pain point that you've identified. Design a mobile app. Four, therapists. Two, record services delivered to clients during their visit. So, service data is easy to enter and more accurate. Notice that we've not specified a list of features for this app. You're just making sure that everyone on the team understands the goal and agrees on it. Once you've agreed on the main goal for your app, you can now identify specific features. For example, each therapist in a clinic could be recording their services slightly different from one another. Let's start by writing a problem statement in support of that use case. Design a menu for therapists to select from a set of services so they are efficient and accurate. Your app could accomplish this by providing a list of services into one drop-down menu. Another feature of the app could be when therapists forget to have their client sign the visit form. The problem statement here would be design a form. Four, patients. Two, sign a confirmation. So, we have a record that they receive services. Your app could solve for this by capturing client signatures digitally. Continue to identify features until you've addressed your initial goal. The problem statement you create will serve as a checklist as you create your app. Pre-cap what we just learned. In this lesson, you learned a four-step process to help you focus your time and effort. The more ambitious your projects become, the more helpful planning tools will be to make them successful. In the next video, you'll learn how to focus on users when you make design decisions.