Tip: Design Work Flow First, Interface Later

For our current project at the university we are developing a (fake) application for the Dutch Railways. What it basically is, is public transport travel planner. Today our team got together to define the work flow of our application (how is our traveler interacting with the application?). This might seem obvious to some but a lot of students seem to just jump in and start designing, without giving any thoughts to how the user will actually interact with the application and the various actions that the device is capable of. What happens when you neglect the work flow? Well, the final product will just be an agglomeration of different screens, as opposed to one cohesive application.
Once you decided how the user will interact with a device and what result particular actions will have, designing it suddenly becomes a lot easier. Taking the time to look at these things will save you a lot of hassles afterwards and will enable you to design the interface a lot quicker. I guess the symptom of not looking at how the user interacts with the application is just one of those things that are very prevalent at CMD, students (and sometimes even teachers) assume that if something looks good it probably works well too.