Is Design The Future of Front End Web Development?

When it comes to engaging with a brand, technology offers a myriad of choices to customers. A single interaction with the brand is likely to change the customer’s perception, making it imperative to provide them with an exceptional end to end web experience.

Today, several enterprises are launching multiple digital initiatives to grow their outreach and gain an edge over the competition. Enterprises that are still in the nascent state of adopting the digital technologies require professional assistance from a front-end web development company, especially in terms of user experience design.

In addition, the enterprise needs to analyze the top task flows, user requirements, and map front-end interactions so as to ensure a personalized, contextual user experience. The complete front end interface journey begins with a design. No matter how hard an enterprise tries to take advantage of technologies, without specifying the interactions and visual design that meets the user requirements, it is impossible to keep customers engaged. Therefore, in this article, we have outlined various important stages that an enterprise must consider to design and develop a successful product prototype.

Discovery:
Identifying the product goals, objectives, as well as the detailed customer requirements for front-end development, is quintessential. You must further determine what you want to build, who the target audience is and how your product will help them. Apart from that, you must also consider stakeholder interviews, heuristic reviews, benchmarking, and requirement gathering to ensure well-detailed discovery for your project.

Synthesis & Modelling:
Prior to pursuing the user journey mapping, it is important to understand the obstacles your clients and customers encounter, their pain points and motivation. Thereafter, define all the top task flows, create persona maps, and analyze user stories in order to ensure that the wireframing and prototyping are designed in an appropriate manner.

Wireframes & Prototypes:
Wireframes and prototypes are imperative as they help you to envision your product even before it is built. You can have your prototype validated by the clients and end users so that if the product requires any iterations, they can be considered and tested during the design phase. Also, you must clearly incorporate all the findings from the top task flows in all the prototypes.

Testing:
After wireframing and prototyping, a thorough usability audit and testing should be carried out to analyze the functioning and efficiency of the user interface with real user feedback and surveys as well as heat maps. This is an important step to test the effectiveness of your product’s UI in the real world scenario.

Without implementing appropriate design aesthetics, it is difficult to build your product using the most advanced technologies. Although technology is also a backbone of some of the most successful product interfaces, many enterprises are also leveraging the modern-age digital technologies for front-end development such as React, AngularJS, Bootstrap, Polymer, and many other alongside CSS and HTML to develop robust and scalable front end.

Front-end development is increasingly becoming dependent on innovative design to provide end users with an interactive user interface. This means the line between front-end design and development is thinning. Both front-end designers and developers are now actively involved in the project from conceptualization to execution while making the entire process more streamlined and agile. We’d like to hear your feedback and thoughts about the importance of design in front-end development. Leave your valuable feedback using the comment section below.

How Startups can use Xamarin to Gain an Edge Over Competition

The software development industry is always in a state of rapid flux. Especially if you are a startup working in the highly competitive and rewarding sector of enterprise mobility. There are challenges galore but so are opportunities. It is important to have your finger on the pulse of the market and be quick to latch on to trends that define the next wave of technology. In the context of mobile applications and web app development, there are several new technologies and trends that have recently captured the imagination of the tech community – Xamarin for app development is one of the most promising trends.

Why Xamarin?
If you search Google trends then Xamarin cross-platform mobile app development services is a prominent search term. There is suddenly a great deal of interest in Xamarin’s potential as a cross-platform framework that lets developers use C# and .NET – that is a near-native experience because it creates a wrapper over the platform-specific SDKs. Let’s take a look at Xamarin’s capabilities in detail.

Native UI in all three platforms:
The difference between Xamarin and other HTML-based cross-platform frameworks like Ionic is that Xamarin creates native UI using native APIs for each platform providing a wrapper over its own SDK.

So, whatever you can do with your native OS, you can achieve with Xamarin and the end-result will be identical. For instance, the creation of TextView in Xamarin is the same as Android or for that matter, even UILabel creation is the same as iOS. This ability to transcend platforms is a great strength for startups who don’t need to spend additional time, resource and money on creating apps for each platform.

What’s more, Xamarin includes Windows Phone and Blackberry users that make a tiny but important percentage of mobile OS users.

Lower cost of development and shorter cycles
As startups are constantly looking for ways to be more cost and time efficient, Xamarin’s low cost of development is a great advantage. Since Xamarin requires only one language expertise – that is C# and utilizes a high percentage of code sharing. Most of the functional bugs and non-UI enhancements have to be done only once and need not to be replicated for each platform – saving a great deal of time and cost. This allows companies to ship quality apps faster.

Improved Time-to-Market and Maintenance Downtime
The extent of code sharing with Xamarin range anywhere from 50% to 100%. The ability to ‘Write Once, Run Anywhere’ by sharing the application logic across systems reduces the team’s time spent on software building. Post sales maintenance is also a breeze with Xamarin because the team need only spend time on fixing issues once.

Mobile is only the tip of the iceberg
While Xamarin has received wide recognition for its mobile app development capabilities, there is more to Xamarin that points to the future of app development. With Xamarin you can build wearable apps, Mac apps, tvOs apps, OpenGL games, SceneKit/SpriteKit/Metal Games and much more. This allows startups to leverage the unbridled potential of application development and gives them an edge over competitors. 

Summary
Xamarin has indubitably carved its name as the go-to framework for startups. As a modern and sophisticated tool, it provides significant gains in cost, quality and time to market the apps. But its selling point is certainly it's near-native app experiences that have made the open-source technology the most coveted one. Have you built mobile apps using Xamarin for your startup? Do share your views in the comments section below.