Digital Blueprints Overview

Every project starts with a Digital Blueprint. Your Blueprint is a visually dynamic summary of your project. The Digital Blueprint transforms your simple prompt into a concept brief of your project.

What’s in it for me?

Your Digital Blueprint incorporates decades of product design experience, best practices, and artificial intelligence insights to expand your prompt into a framework for your digital product. It is also where your project is refined before going further.

Because it is concise and visual, the Blueprint is a great communication tool. If managers, executives, investors, or clients want to see a great summary of your goals, users supported, and design elements, they can quickly scan the Blueprint.

The Blueprint can be edited by you, your collaborators, or by the Archie AI. It’s an evergreen, living document. Any changes made to the Blueprint will be transferred to your Requirements once you opt to move forward with the next step in the process.

For example, if you think of a new user type you want to serve in your product, you can just add it to the Blueprint. Or, if you are wondering if you have missed a user type - you can ask Archie Assistant for ideas. Anything the Assistant generates can be added to the Blueprint.

Problem to be Solved

Problem to be Solved is a framing statement that addresses the purpose of your project: What is the problem you are addressing? What user needs do you want to meet?

This is also where you document the challenges and significance of the problem. What are the risks to users if this problem is not addressed? How much time and money is wasted?

Framing statements are crucial in application development because they clearly define the purpose and scope of your project. These statements ensure that the development team, stakeholders, and potential users all have a common understanding of the application's objectives. Effective framing statements guide the entire development process, ensuring that features and functionalities align with the core goals of the application.

Solution

The Solution section is where you explain how you will solve the proposed problem. It outlines the benefits of using your application (solution) and lists key performance indicators.

A clear solution statement acts as a reference point for decision-making and helps maintain focus, thus preventing scope creep and ensuring the project stays on track. Having concrete performance indicators means that you have clear success metrics you can measure during QA or user testing

AI Enablement Ideas

Integrating AI into your application can provide additional features and optimize operations. In this day and age, it’s almost impossible to think of a new application that doesn’t include AI. But there are a LOT of AI technologies available right now, which can be overwhelming.

Archie can suggest AI implementation ideas that could improve your product. For example, if you have a marketplace application for trading physical goods, your users may want the assets to be automatically tagged using computer vision or appraised using ai-algorithms. AI is a disruptive technology that forces anyone bringing a product or solution to life to utilize first-principles thinking to do a bottoms-up assessment of how the product should operate and deliver value. Archie’s AI Enablement Ideas help you get started.

For more information, see Solution and AI Enablement Ideas.

Application Type

Knowing the exact type of product you are creating guides your design and implementation. Different product types have different technical requirements and application services.

Here are some of the application types available in Archie:

• Software-as-a-Service (SaaS): Subscription or usage-based service applications (e.g., Hubspot, Spotify).
• Digital Marketplace: Platforms connecting buyers and sellers (e.g., AirBnB).
• Internal Application: Tools for organizational efficiency (e.g., custom Excel replacements).
• Portal: Applications for organizational engagement with customers or stakeholders.
• Personal Application: Software for individual personal use (e.g., personal organizers).
• SaaS / Marketplace Combo: Hybrid platforms combining marketplace features with a SaaS model (e.g., Upwork).
• Social Network: Platforms for online social interactions (e.g., Facebook, Instagram).
• AI Assistant or Bot: AI-driven conversational interfaces for enhanced productivity.

Each application type has unique requirements and user expectations. Understanding the application type helps in tailoring the architecture and design to suit the intended audience, selecting the right technological stack, and focusing on the most important features.

For example, if you are developing a Digital Marketplace application like Airbnb, the focus would be on facilitating transactions and interactions between buyers and sellers. This requires features like user profiles, rating systems, secure payment gateways, and an intuitive search function. In contrast, a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) application like Hubspot would prioritize multi-tenant architecture and tools for customer relationship management, including data analytics, report generation, and automated marketing.

Commercialization Model

How will you generate revenue? A financial model is crucial for shaping the application's development, paywall, and user engagement strategies. This section is key for developers, investors, and your company’s business leaders.

Here are some of Archie’s suggested monetization models:

• No Charge: Free access to users.
• Subscription-based: Recurring fee model, possibly with a freemium option.
• Usage-based: Fees based on service consumption levels.
• One-time Purchase: Single fee for permanent application access.
• Advertising: Free access with revenue from in-app advertisements.
• Marketplace: Transaction-based fees in a buyer-seller platform.
• White-labeling / Licensing: Selling the application for rebranding and resale.
• Data Monetization: Selling anonymized user data to third parties.
• Freemium: Basic services for free, premium features for a fee.
• In-app Purchases: Additional features or content available for purchase within the app.
• Sponsorship: Partnering with brands or companies who sponsor parts of the app.
• Donation / Crowdfunding: Voluntary user donations or crowdfunding campaigns.

Whether it's subscription-based, ad-supported, freemium, or a marketplace model, each has implications for the app’s market positioning, user experience, and long-term sustainability. A well-thought-out commercialization model ensures that your app is financially viable, supporting ongoing development and growth. If your product or service will need ongoing development, it needs a clear way to generate revenue or investment capital. If you want to follow a crowdfunding model, you need to make sure your application has a high level of user engagement and excitement.

User Types

This is where you and Archie define your audience. Are your users familiar with technology? Are they experts in their area? Or are they coming to you to teach them something? Maybe you have a mix of user types that need to be addressed.

For instance, in a fitness app, different user types might include "Casual Exerciser," "Professional Athlete," and "Fitness Coach." Each group has unique needs: Casual Exercisers might prefer easy-to-follow workout plans and basic tracking features, Professional Athletes may need advanced analytics and performance tracking, and Fitness Coaches might require tools to manage multiple clients and training schedules. By defining these user types, the app can be designed to offer personalized experiences and functionalities tailored to each group's specific requirements, enhancing the app's usefulness and user engagement.

User types are also used to define the security restrictions of the app. Assigning roles helps in enforcing the principle of least privilege and simplifying permission management at a granular level. Here are some of the benefits:

• Access Control: Roles determine what actions a user can perform, such as reading, writing, editing, or deleting specific data or executing certain functionalities in your application.
• Flexibility: As organizational needs change, roles can be updated, and those changes will automatically apply to all users assigned that role.
• Audit and Compliance: By defining roles, it becomes simpler to track and audit user activities based on the permissions of their roles, ensuring compliance with internal policies or external regulations.
• Simplicity: Grouping several permissions under a specific role reduces complexity, making it easier to understand and manage user access.

In some systems, roles might be combined with other mechanisms like groups or profiles to further refine access controls and user management.

Modules

Modules are the specific, self-contained units of functionality within the software. Each module represents a distinct component designed to address a particular aspect of the application's overall purpose. A module might be a user profile section, a digital marketplace portal, a support chatbot, etc.

Modular design promotes organized, maintainable, and scalable software architecture. These are the pieces that developers and UX designers will use to build your project.

For example, in a marketplace application, one module might handle listing products to sellers, another for managing product listings, and a third for curating marketplace transactions. Each module addresses a specific function, making it easier to update, troubleshoot, and scale individual parts of the app without affecting the whole system. This approach enhances efficiency, allows for easier maintenance, and supports incremental development and upgrades.

Modules are designed to enforce separation of concerns, improve reusability, and reduce redundancy in software. They often have well-defined interfaces through which they communicate with other modules. This leads to:

• Encapsulation: Modules hide their internal implementation details and expose only what's necessary through a well-defined interface. This way, changes inside a module don't affect the rest of the system.
• Cohesion: A module should have a single, well-defined purpose or responsibility. This concept is known as cohesion, where all the functionalities and elements within a module are closely related.
• Reduced Coupling: Modules should ideally operate independently, minimizing dependencies on other modules. When modules need to interact, they should do so through clearly defined interfaces.
• Reusability: One of the benefits of modular design is that modules can often be reused in different parts of an application or even across different projects, as long as the context aligns with the module's functionality.
• Maintainability: With clear boundaries and limited scope, modules are easier to maintain, debug, and update.

Application Services

Application Services are the underlying services in your application. The Blueprint provides a list of application services, or core services, that Archie believes are necessary to power your application. You can select as many as you want.

Defining your application services is crucial for establishing the foundational features and services of your application. For example, in a social media app, application services might include a user authentication service, a notification service, and a transactional text messaging service. By clearly defining these, developers can ensure each part effectively supports various app functions, such as user login, user security, and alerting users to new interactions. This clarity helps create a robust, cohesive, and elegant application experience, facilitating adoption, reuse in development, and future scalability.

Design Considerations

Application design is critical for user experience, engagement, and trust. Should your app be fun, colorful, and addictive? Or should the design be serious, neutral, with a focus on accessibility? This section will help all stakeholders get on the same page when it comes to design.

Application design is the first thing users and investors see when they open your app - not the words, and not the technology. If users find your design ugly or unintuitive, they will leave.

Design is also something that stakeholders in your organization and clients will have big opinions on. Without a firm design plan, your application may languish in an endless cycle of competing design tastes. In short, first impressions are important and good design creates an emotional connection with your users, customers, team members, and other stakeholders.