LemonStand Mobile App Planning

13 | published by Danny Halarewich on Wednesday, December 01, 2010

Since launch, we have had a significant number of customers ask us about an iPhone / Android app. Until recently, we couldn't put much thought into it other than "that would be neat".

Eventually our excitement gave way, and we started to seriously plan out the application and seek out developers that could work with us.

The plan

We'll be starting with an iOS app that works on iPhone and iPad. This is our first mobile app, and we don't want to spread ourselves too thin by developing for multiple platforms at the same time.

We're hoping that after we have a working iPhone / iPad app it can be ported (or rebuilt) to the Android platform.

Once iOS and Android are taken care of, we might look at some other platforms such as Palm or Blackberry.

Features

There are 3 main areas of the application that we came up with: Dashboard, Orders and Reports.

Dashboard

Chart which will resemble the one found on the Dashboard of the LemonStand administration area. It would display revenue in comparison to site traffic. The chart would be interactive.

Another thing we're considering is displaying the 10 latest orders on this page.

Orders

Here you could search for and view orders in a list. Order details could be displayed by tapping on them. You could modify the order's status (Paid → Shipped, after dropping package off with courier) and add comments ("Hi John, your package is now on its way").

Reports

This is where you can view beautiful and helpful reports. The most popular report would display revenue for a period of time.

Profiles

Many of you have multiple LemonStand stores, so we're going to provide a way for you to add different "profiles". One profile for each site.

You could then switch between profiles to access each store.

Notifications

It seems that we can't use traditional push notifications because of the centralized architecture that it requires. This architecture suggests that each LemonStand store would transmit new order notifications to our centralized push server, which would then send the notification to your mobile device.

We don't believe our customers would be keen on letting our server know when they get a new order. Or would they? Let us know your thoughts.

If we can't use push notifications, the app will simply check for new orders while it's open. The app could alert you while it's open. But it couldn't happen in the background, unfortunately.

Going forward

From here, we're going to further define the scope of the app. Then I'll create mockups for the application, and possibly some custom UI elements. At that point we'll pass the materials off to our developer and hopefully be ready to ship after a few months of development.

We want your feedback

What features do you want to see in the app? What type of reports do you specifically want to see in version 1.0 of the app? Do you know any solid Android developers? How do you feel about the push notification issue (above)?

Leave your comments and play a part in molding our new mobile app.

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