Describing your idea

You can describe your idea in any way that makes sense to you.

If you are familiar with user research and user-centred design, you may want to express your app idea through user stories.

A user story describes the features of an app as something your user needs or wants to accomplish.

These stories should result from user research on real people. Since this isn't a user research course we're going to cheat and pretend we've already done that part.

Writing user stories

User stories can be phrased like:

As a user...
I want to...
So I can...

For example, a user story for a conference app could be:

As a conference delegate,
I want to see a list of the events available,
So I can go to the ones that interest me.

You should come up with at least three of these. Keep them safe and refer back to them as you design your app. This will ensure your app answers the needs of your users.

Ideally, you should consider more than one kind of user. For example, a conference app would consider the needs of delegates and organisers.

The Government Digital Service (GDS) has plenty of guidance on writing good user stories.