Planning Data Flows in the App

Understanding data organization

This is a part of app development that usually does not fall under the responsibilities of the frontend developer. Clients will often determine what data they want, and that data is organized by the backend developers. However, if we can participate in the way the data flows are organized, we will make our future work easier. Given that we are only building the frontend of an app using example data, we are free to organize it however we like.

Required data for surfaces

We will use the design file again as the basis for what work needs to be done.

• Starting with the Home screen, we know we need a list of users and a list of items to be displayed on the “Home” surface.

• As per the “Conversations” surface, we will need a list of conversations with respective usernames and messages.

• We will also need data for each one of the conversations, so we can display it on the “Messaging” surface.

• On the “Profile” surface, we will need a list of data pertinent to the user (name, avatar image, statistics) and the following two lists of images:

  • Added images

  • Liked images

As per the surfaces missing from the design, we will need a login and password for the Login screen. We will not need any sample data for the “Add Post” surface.

Users data

The biggest and most obvious piece of the data puzzle we will need is a list of users. Our app will consume the raw JSON file as follows: