“We’re living in an API-first world — Let’s start developing like it.” – Shamasis Bhattacharya, Postman
Capitalise on low hanging fruit to identify a ballpark value added activity to beta test. Override the digital divide with additional clickthroughs from DevOps via premier niche markets.
Technology first has emerged to be the de facto notion while building products and services. On the other hand, in an API-led world, a user-centric approach is vital for creating products that offer real value to customers irrespective of the technology used.
In these changing times, startups must realise that well-designed products and services bring a competitive edge to their organisation. Driving customer engagement and success, design can be a key differentiator, especially for startups.
Changing Business Paradigms
Design-driven startups have disrupted one industry at a time. Like Uber, who transformed the way people travel all with an elegant app connecting riders with cab drivers. But, have you ever wondered what made them so successful? Definitely, an innovative idea was the backbone which was coupled with the perfect mix of exceptional design and immersive user experience.
Hail Design!
When API leads the way
- An API-first approach starts with planning, design mockups and testing before you move ahead with the development part. Being aligned with legendary agile software development process involving rapid iterations and feedback, this process enables the team and other stakeholders to analyse and weigh the project’s progress and functionality early and often.
- Using design mockups, feedback can be gathered in the early stage enabling you to make changes easily before investing a lot of time, money and effort into the project. Further, it also allows all the team members to be on the same page when it comes to the project status.
How can startups benefit from design?
Increase Customer Loyalty = Higher Revenue
Undoubtedly, there is a direct correlation between well-designed products and customer loyalty.
Startups have a wonderful opportunity to build a loyal customer base by making their customers especially early adopters happy with a design-driven product as it has a positive impact on customer loyalty and they tend to stay. It also helps unlock new revenue streams as new customers are on-boarded with positive word of mouth marketing.
Better Understand Customer Needs
Founders of design-led organizations have a better understanding of what their potential and existing customers want. The products/services are designed keeping in mind their requirements. Technology can be copied but a good design helps an organization foster an emotional connect with their customers.
Retain Existing Customers, Attract New Customers and Markets
Design-driven approach can be a game changer in retaining customers while acquiring new customers and markets. With design-led user/market research and prototyping, brands can identify customer needs that are not being met with the existing product. The insights can be used to improve offerings or create new product/service that bridge the gap.
Creating Experiences that Customers Love
Realizing the importance of design, organizations create experiences that customers love and want to experience again. This is achieved by prioritizing design and putting customers first in whatever they build.
Improve Product Development
Building competitive products/services starts with understanding your customer requirements and preferences. The more you know about your customers leveraging market and user research, higher are the chances that you will develop products/services they would actually want to buy.
Seamless Customer Experience across Different Touchpoints
Today, a customer’s buying journey involves more touch points than it ever did in the past. In fact, it is the customers, who decide when and how they interact with your brand. A customer’s product search might begin with a store visit or by accessing the website from his/her desktop followed by numerous interactions using a smartphone, computer or tablet. Gone are the days of fragmented engagement across different channels. With this realisation, design-driven startups consciously strive to deliver seamless customer experience across multiple touch points and devices that easily adapts to the different ways a customer discovers and interacts with their business.
How can startups incorporate design in their work culture and product from Day one?
Design must play a significant role in your startup work culture as it helps brands understand customers and their needs. To begin with founders and other top management must believe that a design-first approach offers a strategic advantage to the organisation. Design must be incorporated in product/service development right from the onset rather than bringing it towards the end of the development process.
Steps to achieve Design Success
- Right from the beginning include design with a capital D as an integral part of your business strategy.
- Find out different areas where and how design is currently being used in your workflows
- Analyze and identify methods of improving your existing design process. This may include hiring a professional design consultant or enhancing the skill set of your present designing team.
- Recognize new design opportunities within your business model.
- Make design considerations part of your meeting agenda and planning documents.
Takeaway
Good design is often the only difference between a successful and failed product.
More than 80% of your customers try to reach you through their smartphones, tablets or other mobile gadgets. Majority of your crucial business processes happen through mobile including activities such as interaction, product (service) selection, order placement, and payment. The profitability that a mobile application can gift your business is indisputable. However, a mobile app can take your business to the next level only if it combines the best of speed, appearance, functionality, intuitiveness, and user experience.
When you select a mobile app development approach, you need to consider these and many other aspects scrupulously. In this post, we highlight the features of both native and hybrid development approaches, their differences and help you understand which one would be the right choice for your business.
Native Mobile Application Development
Native mobile applications are built for a particular platform/ device using the platform SDK, tools and language. The most common examples of native apps are iOS apps and Android apps. A native mobile application is coded using a specific programming language catering to a particular platform. For instance, you have languages such as XCode/ Objective C/ Swift used for developing iOS apps and Eclipse/Java for creating Android apps. Native applications are designed to function on a specific device or operating system. Hence, they take advantage of the device-specific hardware and software to offer highly optimised performance and results.
The key advantages of native mobile development include unmatched user experience, high performance, and processing speed, offline support, seamless with integration with mobile hardware, data security, reliability, personalisation, testing convenience and support from application stores.
Hybrid Mobile Application Development
A hybrid mobile app is one that combines the elements of both native as well as web applications. The word hybrid refers to “anything derived from heterogeneous sources or composed of different elements.” It’s a web application that behaves like a native app when installed on a device. A hybrid mobile application is developed using the standard web development languages such as JavaScript, CSS or HTML5. When you install a wrapper to act as a bridge between platforms, it accesses the native features. In the words of Telerik, hybrid application development “is the marriage of web technology and native execution.”
A simpler and faster cycle of development, ease to build using web technologies, lower cost of development, unified application logic, single code base, access to device’s internal APIs, one app for all platforms, etc. are some of the advantages of hybrid app development.
Native vs. Hybrid: What are the key differences
If you’re thinking of building a mobile application, you must consider the differences between native and hybrid development approaches as well as how your selection will impact your business.
Here is a comparison of both frameworks:
Which one is a better choice for you?
It’s not our point to say one is better than the other. To make things simpler for you, we try to present a guide to choosing between native and hybrid app development.
By this time, you would have come up with the kind of requirements for your project. Have your expectations ready and take a look at which path is better for you.
Go for NATIVE mobile application development, if:
- Your application needs to work both online and offline
- Your application needs to be highly responsive
- Your majority users prefer to use a particular platform such as iOS
- Your mobile app needs to access device-specific features
- Your users expect high performance and speed
- You have a reasonably good budget to develop a native mobile app
- Your business needs to support particular functions
- Your mobile app needs to include large amounts of sophisticated graphics
- You want to offer your users the ultimate user experience
Go for HYBRID mobile application development, if:
- Your app doesn’t demand any complex calculations and animations
- You don’t need the advanced graphics performance offered by a native app
- You need to get to a large number of users simultaneously through web and mobile
- Your app needs to make use of available hardware provided by the device
- You need to test your ideas quickly and cut down time-to-market
- You already have a website, and you need to launch a mobile application with minimal development cost quickly
- You need to target multiple mobile platforms
- You need to use the app when the device is offline
Few thoughts to share
In terms of performance and speed, any developer would agree that native mobile apps outperform hybrid. Native apps can access the inbuilt capabilities of a user’s device like the Contacts, GPS, or camera, and the approach doesn’t sacrifice on the design elements unique to a platform. If your priority is to get your business faster to your market within a lower budget, then a hybrid app may be the right choice.
Beyond user experience and other features, many businesses look at the cost of development as a crucial factor for selecting the development approach. Mobile development costs differ on a case-to-case basis. For example, gaming apps that require only a handful of features can choose the hybrid approach. However, if your business needs to offer a highly personalized experience to your users such as a healthcare app or a travel app, then you might have to consider the native approach.
If you are curious to find out which kind of mobile application development approach suits your business requirements,Contact Us.We would be happy to offer both consulting and development services to take your business to the next level.
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