Skillshub Singapore is a learning marketplace platform that allows adults to register part-time or one-time courses provided by registered courses training providers in Singapore. People often register for cooking, jewelry making, coffee making or customer services courses and get a certificate after they complete the course. People can leave feedback after they register and finish their courses.

The platform estimates and display final course fee provided their nationality, their estimated income, and their age. In Singapore, people who fall in the range of age and income will have a financial aid around $1000 for registered courses.

Guang Lin is the founder of Skillshub. He approached Vanntechs to build a fully custom web application development for Skillshub.

Step 1. Learning about Skillshub’s requirements

Understanding fully what are Skillshub’s features is very important. In the first step, we talked to the founder to understand his perspective. At that moment, Skillshub had a general picture but didn’t reach the detailed feature come-up stage.

After several discussions, we will come up with the first custom app development quotation with features. The quotation will include:

• What features that Skillshub will have, how long and how many hours per feature
• Milestone based on how many hours defined.
• Extra costs and what is the rate if there is an extra feature added in the future.

The quotation needs to be signed off to move on with step 2. This quotation will direct us to the correct approach and scope, then we will come up with more details work-flow documentation later on.

Step 2. Workflow and application’s wireframe documentation

This step is considered as one of a milestone inside the quotation provided in step 1. At the end of step 2, the deliverables are the confirmed workflow and confirmed wireframe documentation.

Wireframe documentation is black and white (added some basic colors) with detailed comments and workflows that how the app looks like. The following is an example of a custom app development wireframe:

There is no point in Photoshop designing something that we don’t really know what is the thing. For customized app development, it is very important for you to understand all flows and all perspectives that an end-user expects when they visit or use your site.

After all, documentations are reviewed, both parties will do a sign off to confirm the flows, features and how the app daftly looks like.

Step 3. Design UI based on the app’s wireframe

At this step, based on the wireframe we signed off from step 2, we will make some designs and “add colors” to make your web app “real” and beautiful.

Example below:

We provide the designing services for your application and it is included in the customized app development package. If you have your own designer, we will remove this service from the quotation in step 1.

The designing service fee is based on how your app is complex.

The deliverable of this step is the UI designing documentation that how your app is like. You must sign off the documentation to make sure all designs confirmed before we proceed to step 4: development.

Step 4: Development

We follow Agile software development methodology, which means:

• We set up a staging server that will host our in-progress developing web app. You are informed by our project management tool (Trello) that if some features are done, and you are free to come to our beta-testing site to do your own testing. By doing that, you can provide us your feedback and we can fix or adapt the changes quickly.

Step 5. User Acceptance Testing

This stage always takes 2 weeks after the day we finished stage 4.

You are requested to do a full review of your app on the testing server. You are free to do any actions that you think your users may do.

This process will include our bugs fixing if it has.

The deliverable at the end of this stage is a final signed off to confirm all features are delivered.

Step 6. Publish your app

If everything is confirmed, we will deploy your app to a production server. We will handle domain mapping for you. You can choose to host your app with us (fee will be varied based on the number of users who access your site), or you can have your own server and we will migrate the app to your server.

I will do the maintenance service for free after 90 days that you confirmed on step 4. Skillshub is our success story that launched in Singapore in 2017 and it is running now, with many users register courses on the platform.