Indigo Studio Helps Teams Collaborate to Build Apps Right the First Time

DevToolsGuy / Monday, November 14, 2016

Indigo Studio empowers designers, developers, product managers and end users to collaboratively create and test rapid prototypes for mobile, desktop and modern web.

Cranbury, NJ - November 14, 2016Infragistics, a worldwide leader in providing tools and solutions that accelerate design, development, and collaboration, today introduced free and subscription versions of Indigo Studio, its intuitive, code-free prototyping software. Indigo Studio’s design-first, code-later approach to rapid prototyping saves coding cycles and ensures that stakeholders are bought into the proposed solution long before it is code-complete. Indigo Studio’s first-of-its-kind unmoderated usability testing at scale helps ensure that end users will be just as satisfied with the final design as internal stakeholders.

Gartner stated in their November 2016 report, “Mobile App Development Is Transforming Testing Processes Within Enterprises[1]” that, “Higher expectations for mobile app quality increase the chance that application leaders will fail to satisfy users and business sponsors,” and “Mobile app testing requires new techniques and technologies, which can cause application leaders to underestimate delivery times and costs.” In fact, they estimate that in less than 4 years, “70% of enterprise mobile apps used in enterprises will be developed or adopted without IT involvement.” That leads them to recommend that businesses:

  • Define and implement a proactive quality strategy that leverages prototyping, mobile app analytics, and includes automated testing of mobile experiences across platforms.
  • Prioritize testing to reflect the business model for the application, including targeted end-user devices, distribution channels and data volume.
  • Plan for the initial impact on overall development productivity as teams gain competency, and ramp up and adjust delivery goals accordingly.

Through this kind of early prototyping, Indigo helps address the most common and costly frustrations that otherwise arise:

  • Designers struggle with requirements documents that don’t provide enough user insight; their wireframes convey to developers how the app is supposed to look, but not how it works.
  • Developers build to agreed-on business requirements, but more often than not business stakeholders have something more specific in mind than they described in writing.
  • Stakeholders focus on describing their desired outcome, but developers interpret them literally and narrowly.
  • End users don’t have a chance to test and provide feedback until late in the process; by that time, design changes are costly and time-consuming.

“We want to help designers and stakeholders show their dev teams what they need—without needing to code,” said Ken Rosen, Senior Director of Product Management at Infragistics. “A visual, functional up-front prototype leads to an accurately shared vision before the first developer starts to code. That can save a lot of time and money otherwise spent on lengthy requirements meetings and late-in-the-game re-designs. As the industry saying goes, if a picture is worth a thousand words, a prototype is worth a thousand meetings."

“We can show a prototype and go through the features,” said David Ismailov, lead of the UX group for Unified Functional Testing at HPE Software. “It's really easy to get everyone on the same page; it's easy for everyone to comment on something that is believable, that behaves like a real application. Indigo helps us communicate the value of complex technologies like actionable, smart insights that can be derived from big data, allowing us to get the budget we needed for our next project. No one has to imagine what the apps will do; we just see how it works.”

With Indigo Studio, an individual designer or a team of stakeholders works with out-of-the-box controls for today’s most popular platforms, or they can create or import their own. Either way, Indigo’s smart, state-based flow anticipates and guides them toward a rapid prototype. They can publish the prototype to Infragistics’ cloud-based prototyping and testing platform, where stakeholders and end users can kick the tires and provide feedback. Finally, Indigo’s remote unmoderated usability testing lets designers validate their design and iterate at scale, ensuring the best possible UX.

“If we’re doing new product development, we spend a lot of time talking about who will be using it, what problems it’s solving, on and on,” said Charles Plath, Director of User Experience at Instec. “Once we’ve come up with some good concepts for apps like our flagship, Quicksolver, we execute those concepts with Indigo Studio. Indigo has been vital for us because it allows us to stand prototypes up really fast. Through the concept and prototype phase, we’re able to solve most of the major issues upfront, way before we’ve had to spend hundreds and hundreds of hours in development. The cost savings is immeasurable.”

Beginning today, Indigo Studio is available in three versions:

  • Indigo Studio Essential: the nimble wireframe and prototyping tool for designers and developers creating prototypes for their own use, available for free.
  • Indigo Studio Professional: the powerful prototyping suite for designers, PMs, and developers who do more sophisticated prototyping and require validated feedback and usability testing for up to five concurrent projects, available in a monthly or annual subscription plan.
  • Indigo Studio Enterprise: the no-limits prototyping suite for teams of designers, PMs, and developers who require robust prototyping and usability testing and an always-available archive of projects past and present, available by annual subscription.

Get Indigo Studio Essential for free, get started with hands-on tutorials, and download our free eBook at infragistics.com/indigo-studio.


[1] Gartner: Mobile App Development Is Transforming Testing Processes Within Enterprises – November 1, 2016

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MEDIA CONTACT
Ange McLaughlin
Infragistics Corporate Communications
amclaughlin@infragistics.com
Phone: (609) 297-4219

ABOUT INFRAGISTICS
Infragistics is a worldwide leader in providing tools and solutions to accelerate application design and development, insights and collaboration for any organization. Infragistics enterprise-ready UX and UI toolkits are used by over 1 million developers to rapidly prototype and build high-performing applications for the Cloud, Web, Windows, iOS and Android devices. Infragistics Enterprise Mobility solutions ReportPlus and SharePlus, gives business users the latest advancements in self-service business intelligence and collaboration software. Additionally, Infragistics offers expert UX Services and award-winning support.

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