Before designing screens, I’m mapping out how the app actually works.

Okay, we're back for step 2. So now that we've figured out what it is we want on our, on our app, right, you can see we've got discovery, likes, filtering chats. We did this in step 1. Now we need to figure out how it's all going to fit into the app. Now this is really in the design phase, right? It's a little past the strategy. Strategy is figuring out what it is that we want there. Now we're going to start designing it.

Now there's, there's a couple ways. Before I even design how it looks, I start with just How are things going to flow?

How is a user going to navigate through this? Where is everything going to live? Those things are called a user journey and information architecture. And some of this is to be informed from discussions with potential users, looking at competitors, because users may be familiar with certain patterns that they've seen on other apps, right? They expect it to function similar.

So there is some, some research that should happen in between.

I'm going to kind of, kind of rush this for sake of video, but normally there is more research and this takes a lot longer, but I kind of break it out into— I'm going to do the information architecture now. So we've got unauthorized. So that's everything that happens before you've logged in and then you have authorized. So everything that happens after you log in. So on unauthorized, you need a sign up, you need a login, you may need a forgot password, right?

Just in case you don't, you know, have that.

And then there's like a password confirmation, stuff like that. But moving on, let's get to the authorized So in the authorized, we have those main sections we looked at: discover, let's say likes, um, what else do we have?

Filtering chats, chats, and profile, right?

Which is your profile. Now we do know a little bit more about the profile, so we can put on here the maybe settings, which then has logout, right?

Logout.

Right. But there may be additional settings here too, and you can get extensive as you want. And this is important because you're going to need to know what details are going to be here. So this is starting to be the high-level overview of your structure of your app, right? And if you kind of see it, Like you may, if you think about this as a phone, you've got like these 4 tabs, Discover, Likes, Chat, Profile. And then you, once you're in that section, these are all the things that you can do within that section.