And a few highlights from that article:
10 Questions Developers May Have Forgot to Ask
So here are some of the questions that developers may not have thought to ask and a little bit of commentary around each question.
1. eCommerce – Is this subscription? If so, how many kinds of subscriptions? What are the rules for subscriptions? Discount support? Free-trials? Bundling? Coupons? Often this ties to marketing support. In other words, you want to offer a discount to a given group to provide incentive. Is it pay-to-play? Do you transact immediately or on delivery of some product or service? Do you have a merchant account already set up? Do you have a payment gateway?
2. Targets – Is this browser only? How concerned are we about design for mobile? Which devices? Native mobile apps? Obviously, it’s far simpler to aim for browser-based systems and basically aim your design to work okay on mobile devices with some additional effort on the part of the user.
3. Registration – will you support Facebook Connect or similar authentication? Will you also have a separate login? See also – When to Use Facebook Connect – Twitter Oauth – Google Friend Connect for Authentication. Do you need to round trip an email to validate the email? Captcha? How much member profile information do you need before allowing a user to login?
4. Member Profiles – What data is included? Is there a step-by-step wizard? Pictures?
5. Social Integration/Viral Outreach – are you integrating in some way with social networks? Is your integration limited to login and “like” buttons or are you building a presence within the social networks themselves? Messaging? Any other kind of viral outreach? See Branchout an Example of Viral Spread Opportunity for Startups. Refer a friend? Cloudsponge for email invites to large group?
6. Communication/Forums – are there discussion forums? Commenting? Messaging? Flagging? Moderation?
7. Social Interaction – how do you represent users/members to one another? Is there interaction? What kinds? Friends? I would actually suggest that asking if you want friending/connections is a bit of a trick question. Generally, the answer should be “no.” How, if at all, are users grouped by the system? By background (employer, university)? By preferences?
8. Location/Geography – are you using geographic information? How? Is your application location-aware? Will you tap into geolocation services provided by the browser or license a third-party lookup table? How does the application behave when location data is not available?
9. Gamification/Scoring – any kind of scoring and/or gamification to encourage participation? Are there achievements and badges? A leaderboard among users or groups?
10. Video (and Audio) – if you have video, are you hosting it or can we use YouTube, Vimeo? Do you need to process user-contributed media? What about reporting and moderation? Do you want Flash video, HTML 5 video, or both? Does it need to playback on mobile devices?