Design a small app before you ask for it: a weekly review board

Before you ask any assistant to build a small app, spend five minutes designing it on paper. You end up with a better description, and on Octuo's Canvas, a description is all it needs to start.

What follows is a worked example. It is hypothetical and illustrative, not a report of how anyone uses Octuo. The app is a weekly review board.

Step 1: Start from a recurring moment.

Good small apps come from something you do repeatedly. Here, every Friday afternoon you look back at the week, list what is still open and decide what carries over. Today that lives in scattered notes and messages.

Step 2: List what you keep.

Three to five things per item: a short title, an owner, a status (open, waiting, done) and a note. Stop there. Every extra field is one more thing to fill in at five o'clock on a Friday.

Step 3: List what you do.

Verbs, not nouns: mark done, move to next week, filter by owner, add a note. If you can't name the verbs, you're designing a document, not an app.

Step 4: Decide what stays in view.

Anything open goes on top. Anything waiting on someone else sits in its own group, so it doesn't get lost.

Step 5: Put it in words.

Combine steps 1 to 4 into one short paragraph, for example: "I review my week every Friday. Each item has a title, an owner, a status and a note. I want to mark items done, move them to next week and filter by owner. Keep open items at the top and group anything waiting on someone else."

Step 6: Decide who operates it.

On the Canvas, Octuo can see and operate an app as well as you can. That makes the board a shared surface: you click, it updates, and you both work from the same place. Decide up front which actions are yours and which you'd ask the assistant to take.

Where the built-in modules fit

Canvas also includes built-in modules. The notes module keeps your own ideas and reference material close; the memory module lets you view and manage the memory available to your agent. They live on the same Canvas as your app.

Why design first

Octuo builds interactive apps on its Canvas from a description, and tomorrow they're still there. The clearer the description, the less there is to guess about what you'll get.

Octuo is available for macOS. If you try this, start with one recurring moment and no more than four sentences.