Inside Apple And IBM's App Making Machine


Fast Company has an great read on the Apple-IBM partnership. The partnership merges Apple's hardware and user design expertise with IBM's back-end system and business client relationships.

There are a lot of things worth highlighting, but here's a look at how a client's app is developed in a workshop.

Fast Company:

During one workshop, one of the end users explained: "When I need to do that, I just write it on my hand," Sylvia-Miller recalls. "And the manager was like, 'you what?!'" It's exactly this kind of nitty-gritty day-to-day work reality that gets exposed during the three-day workshops--things a middle manager might never know about.

The first day of the workshop is spent mainly talking to end users about their workday and about how the app might best be integrated into the work. After that, the Apple and IBM designers begin to develop actual app screens that carefully reflect the users' workflows.

By the end of the three-day workshop, the participants will have created the first few screens of a new app.