A close friend of my brother's was recently diagnosed with cancer. After my brother found out, he called me and asked if I could help him think of a way that his friend (who we'll call "Anna") and my brother ("Zack") could listen to Bruce Springsteen songs together while Anna was going to chemotherapy treatments as a way to stay in touch and to give Anna something to stay busy with during her emotional roller coaster that is chemo treatment.
I'm a business analyst - so I asked my brother about 2 hours worth of questions to try to see what he was envisioning and to understand how he expected the whole thing to work.
These were the "functional requirements" that we landed on (this is much less formal than I'd usually prepare professionally, but this gives you the jist).
The app:
This was an incredibly heartwarming thing to work on. It was really beautiful to see Anna and Zack's reflections on any given song be especially in the light of everything that she has been through and the importance that music has played in her journey. I also built it in such a way that my brother could see how far Anna had fallen behind, which gave him some insight into Anna's mental state so that he could offer some extra support when she may have needed it.
And Knack made it relatively easy to build an app like this. If you have some basic facility with structured data (that is, normalized database structure), I highly recommend it.
I'm a business analyst - so I asked my brother about 2 hours worth of questions to try to see what he was envisioning and to understand how he expected the whole thing to work.
These were the "functional requirements" that we landed on (this is much less formal than I'd usually prepare professionally, but this gives you the jist).
The app:
- Shows both Zack and Anna the same song every day in sequential order from Bruce Springsteen's latest album - a three set discography called "Tracks". On any given day, the song is referred to as "the assignment" or the "assigned song".
- The assigned song changes every day whether or not the given user has listened to it or not.
- Any assigned songs that were not listened to on their given day get put into a queue of "old assignments" that the user can see. This way, if Zach/Anna are behind, they can see exactly the songs that they need to listen to to get "caught up".
- Both Zack and Anna can leave their own reflections as or after they listen to the song in a text field
- All reflections are stored in a table that shows every song, both past and future.
- Each song is included with it's Spotify link so that the user can access a recording and listen to it quickly.
This was an incredibly heartwarming thing to work on. It was really beautiful to see Anna and Zack's reflections on any given song be especially in the light of everything that she has been through and the importance that music has played in her journey. I also built it in such a way that my brother could see how far Anna had fallen behind, which gave him some insight into Anna's mental state so that he could offer some extra support when she may have needed it.
And Knack made it relatively easy to build an app like this. If you have some basic facility with structured data (that is, normalized database structure), I highly recommend it.
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