Using State Charts to design and validate your user flows

After my last blog around my unsuccessful quest to find the “perfect Todo List app” that would allow me to better manage my 7 days, 6 weeks, 6 months approach to planning I decided to start looking into how I could build my own Todo List app that meets my needs.

In the past I’ve built two digital products, one was a mobile app to help jobseekers create CVs quickly called JiffyCV and the other was an interactive user flow mapping tool called reciprocal.dev. I learned a lot from building these products.

From JiffyCV I learned the importance of shipping fast in order to validate the idea with real users instead of trying to do everything “by the book” like I would do in my day job. I spent 7 months working myself towards burn-out and when the app shipped the download numbers were so low that I closed it down instead of spending my time supporting something I didn’t have the energy to maintain.

From reciprocal.dev I learned the importance of sales and how that is a skill I really need to develop. I shipped the MVP of the app within a month and this really helped to validate the idea, having gone through multiple iterations of the app’s concepts based on real user feedback. I also used blogging to talk about the journey I took when I created this, which got lots of good feedback. However due to a lack of time to keep pushing the sales the idea started to die on the vine and I had to make a call to close it down.