How to Design your Apps for the Future of Business

How to Design your Apps for the Future of Business
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By 2020, total smartphone subscriptions will be 9.2 billion led by tremendous growth in less mature markets, according to Ericsson’s Mobility Report. The continued growth of mobile accessibility will dramatically revolutionize things around the entire industry.

As the increasingly remote economy grows, so must the developers and designers that drive the industry. New trends and disruptive technologies will continue to make it easier for developers and designers to monetize their apps, target niche audiences, ads, and split test different business models like the ever popular ‘freemium’ option.

But often, product owners and stakeholders feel disconnected from app developers and designers. “The biggest unmet need in app development is control and efficient feedback cycles,” says Anders Lassen, CEO of Fuse, a toolkit for mobile apps, when describing the current landscape of app development.

Before an app leaves the sphere of “idea,” the concept lives as sketches and prototypes. After the app enters the world of implementation, Lassen explains, “It can all go pear-shaped very quickly even in disciplined and experienced organizations. Designers’ ability to directly affect the final look and feel of the app is also greatly reduced once the app enters code form.”

This slow development process is not just limited to people who write code but is common for anyone involved in the process of making apps.

Start Internally

A lot of the problem is demonstrated by the idea of an internal handover, for instance, from designer to developer, being some magical ritual after which one of the parties no longer has any influence.

“Of course, we all know that waterfall-based development is not the way to go, but the tools used for the different parts of the job don’t reflect that,” explains Lassen. “Whether it’s paper prototypes, visual design tools or code-writing IDEs, they all create barriers between those who are skilled in using them and those who are not.”

In other words, he says, there are some excellent tools out there for the separate stages of the development, but very little that deals with the common parts and the fact that it should all fit together nicely in the end.

Effectively it becomes a cycle of when you’re at a particular stage, using particular tools, then you can do your best work. But after this point, you are limited to just providing advice which (if it’s taken into consideration at all) must be executed by someone with a completely different skillset and background.

The Bus Factor

A familiar term among software developers, the “bus factor” is a measurement of the risk resulting from information and capabilities not being shared among team members, derived from the phrase "in case they get hit by a bus.”

“In short, you should care because if you don’t put effort into building and maintaining your culture, your team will eventually be overtaken by a strong personality who cultivates his culture in your team,” says Brian W. Fitzpatrick, author of Team Geek: A Software Developer’s Guide to Working Well with Others.

As you grow your team, it is crucial to have a diverse and empowered workforce. This means that ideas are analyzed, tested, and evaluated quickly. The potential number of people on your team that can be hit by a bus before a project stops completely. To build apps that drive businesses into the future, team leaders must be agile in operations and populate their workforce with diverse and empowered experts. This means that ideas are tested quickly, and design interactions that don’t work well are eliminated.

User Experience

Regarding user experience, allowing more people to be part of the iteration loop (which will also become shorter and shorter) is essential to make sure the right ideas are tested early in the process of building an app.

The faster a developer's assumptions are tested on a real scale, the better. Sketches, offline user experience testing, and prototyping can only take you so far. “We’ve seen time and time again that what seems like good ideas in the testing process end up falling completely flat when the app reaches real users.”

As Hubspot UX Research Rachel Decker has said, “Usability testing shows you if something is usable. Beta testing shows you if people will actually use it.”

The Future

When asked about the future of app development, Lassen explained: “Most developers will have adopted some sort of cross-platform methodology — either partially or completely end-to-end. In the same way that we see machine learning making its way (slowly) into the design process, smart algorithms and AI-inspired processes will also have more and more influence on how apps are being constructed and tested.”

Tools will become more visual and easier to work with, for everyone involved in the app design and building processes, and there will be way less friction between them as well.

Designers will become more and more code-driven because using code in designs that would otherwise have been static mockups and images will be the new norm. At the same time, the process of writing that code will be much simpler, with tools assisting designers to the point where a lot of them won’t know they’re actually coding. Real data and widespread use of good, cross-platform layout engines will be the choice for smart designers in the future.

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