The Design Process

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The first thing that you must do when you begin designing an application is to identify your customers. Who will be using the application? It might be just one person, a small workgroup within your company, or an entire department. Perhaps you are a consultant building custom applications for other companies. Maybe you are building Office-based applications to package and sell through a retail outfit or over the Internet. Whoever your customers are, you should have a thorough understanding of their business processes and their requirements before you begin building your application.

In This Section

• What Do Your Customers Want?
  The first step in the design process is to get a clear idea of what your customers want. This can take some time and patience, especially if your customers are not technical people by nature.
• What Do Your Customers Need?
  What your customers want and what your customers require are not always the same thing.
• At the Drawing Table
  When you have gathered as much information as you can from your customers, sit down with a pencil and paper, and sketch out the initial design for the application — the technologies to be used, the user interface, and the organization of the code.
• Building a Prototype
  For most Microsoft® Office XP applications, you are not required to build a full-fledged prototype — the application you are building can act as the prototype you show to your customers.

Related Sections

• Designing Applications
  Understand how planning a good effective design can mean delivering the application that customers require.
• Which Technologies Should You Use?
  Determine the type of application you want to create and which application or technologies to use as the basis for your application.
• Thinking About User Interface Design
  Understand how an effective user interface is an important aspect to application design.
• Designing Code for Reusability
  Maximize the reusability of your code by spending some time thinking about how to structure your code within the application.
• Security Considerations
  Protect your intellectual property by securing your code and protect your application from viruses and unwelcome users.
• Testing Your Application
  Test your code to make sure that each part of the application works as expected.
• Application Deployment
  After you develop an application, you can distribute it to users.