Tags: App development, Application design, Startups, UI/UX
There are a few more exciting things in life than creating something from nothing, watching your hard work evolve from an idea into a product. Seeing people hold in their hands something that, only a short time before, was just a thought in your mind. As you set yourself down to build your first application, you’re walking the path of those that have helped revolutionize our world. From Facebook to Uber, Tinder to Twitter, you’re part of a small group of like-minded people that want to build a new way to disrupt and innovate.
As you sit down to chart your development process, there are a few key points that you have to remember – namely, the design comes before coding. The most painful mistake that your fellow startuppers make is to start the building process before you know what you’re creating. An architect will always draw blueprints of his building before giving them to their construction team, and the same holds for app development.
The perks of approving UI/UX before coding starts
The DB Best team designs hundreds of applications for startups and enterprise-level solutions.
Because of our long history of building applications, we know just how much time and resource you’ll save by designing the UI/UX first.
A prototype to rely on
Having a well-designed, comprehensive prototype minimizes any chances of miscommunication between you and your development team. The developers will deliver the product per the design that you’ve created. It ’s always easier to bring to life an already illustrated idea than the perfectly described abstraction.
No extra expenses
You can decide to change anything to your whole concept, and it won’t hit your pocket.
More chances to attract investor’s attention
You can present a solid and viable concept to your partners and to your potential investors to justify an increase in your budget.
Beginning with a brief
When you sit down with your DB Best Account Manager for the first time, we’re going to ask you a few questions about how you envision your application. After technical research, in which we consult our developers and engineers on how we can bring your idea to life, we will begin the process of sketching your UI/UX. During this time, we will work with you on creating a comprehensive brief.
We need the brief to find the best solutions and collect all the necessary data to begin building your application’s infrastructure. It’s here that we dig into the smallest details about your app, get to know your potential users, and emulate their habits. The job of our design team is to predict how the app will accommodate the different ways that the customer could behave. The best UI/UX solutions come directly from users’ lifestyles. So, it’s not about reinventing the wheel, it’s about understanding human relationships with technology.
Most of all, the brief examines your competitors, analyzes their the best practices along with their mistakes, and makes conclusions based on what worked and what didn’t from their real-life experiences.
Wireframing your idea
With a ready-made brief, we can move on to the next stage. Wireframing your future application refers to sketching its main screens. Our designers will deliver a set of illustrations outlining interfaces with their essential elements, sizes, positioning on the screen, and content distribution.
During the wireframing stage, we work out the drafts, which are meant to help the UX team concentrate on the relationships and navigation among the screens and elements. As we progress, the whole team will iterate and discuss these drafts with you.
The wireframing stage allows our team a chance to uncover the methods of representing or displaying the content, decide on the main functionality for each page, and prepare the UX team for prototyping.
We create black-and-white wireframes to concentrate on application functionality, and not to let our customers get distracted with styling.
Some entrepreneurs think they can skip the wireframing stage and get right to the design. That is how they concentrate on secondary tasks and miss the stage of app functionality designing. This strategy grants them getting back to the question of usability again at the latest stages of full application deployment.
Prototyping your future application
A prototype is an interactive visualization of application flow. During this stage, we build on the wireframes and add styling, so that you can see the whole concept in color. The job of the prototype is to show how your users will interact with your app. Thus, it takes you as close as possible to your product before any coding begins.
When the prototype is ready you can gather more user feedback and reactions from potential customers, so you can continue to develop and improve upon the original idea.
With your prototype, you are free to experiment with ideas, as well as check functionality and usability, before you spend any money on full-blown development.
Testing your prototype backward and forward
Once you get the prototype, you have to ask for opinions and test it on your real users. Even if the design entirely matches your initial vision and idea. The simplest way to doom all the work done before is to skip the testing stage right here. So just don’t.
is the ROI, that the well-tested design can benefit you
Ask as many people from your target audience as you can reach to test on your prototype.
Listen to their comments on your UI/UX. Watch them use your product and twig the design or scenario issues they felt wrong about but did not raise.
Keep on iterating until your users become excited with the experience they had using your application.prototype. This is how you eliminate the possible problems your user may face before getting started with development.
We make this fuss for a reason
From the DB Best solid grounding, we know that your application success depends on how hard you hit the numbers at the sketching stage. So it’s better to fail fast and take all the benefits this failure brings. Such as the clear idea of your future application look-and-feel and an opportunity to save your costs on emending flubs at the stage of development. So contact us, and we’ll lead you through all the challenges of the development process right to the Big Market.
