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"Application leaders must understand the key features of digital product design platforms and deploy a tool to cover everything from screen design to code generation."Gartner, Technology Insight for Digital Product Design Platforms, Nov 24, 2020
Digital product design platforms have emerged as a core tool for digital product teams for the iterative design and development process, with capabilities including screen design, prototyping, collaboration with stakeholders, user testing and code generation. According to Gartner, in the era of remote work and distributed teams, real-time visual collaboration and co-editing are critical to innovation. Digital product design platforms are acting as the new whiteboard for the entire digital product team.
This paper will look at the 4 issues that teams usually face with digital product design:
Your tools do not work together
Starting new projects takes too much time
Teams productivity is low – no Rapid Application Development (RAD) tools
It takes too much time to update code or components from a design
It will also describe the recently released Indigo.Design App Builder, a new cloud-based WYSIWYG drag & drop tool that helps teams design and build complex business apps faster than ever before. App Builder is part of Indigo.Design, the world’s only digital product design platform with a complete design-to-code solution.
In today’s fast-paced and agile work environment, design and development teams are using different, disconnected tools throughout the app creation process, slowing the delivery of your final product. This leads to miscommunication, and costly errors caused by excessive hand-offs, and ultimately slows the delivery of your application which causes friction between the different teams.
Solution: Use Single Platform for Design and Development Team Collaboration
With Indigo.Design, you get a single app creation platform for both design and development teams to collectively work together. With fewer handoffs, teams save both time and money, while reducing the amount of miscommunications. You will experience an accelerated app creation process with a single end-to-end design system, backed by components, providing a single source of truth from the design to code creation.
Indigo.Design stores your designs in the cloud (or on-prem if you choose that configuration). Prototypes can be shared directly with users and stakeholders via the Share tool in Indigo.Design with a unique URL. People that matter most in your feedback loop can give their direct feedback, which can be viewed in real-time across your team. This type of collaboration on designs and prototypes can be internal or with external stakeholders. You can use this feedback to iteratively improve your design, create user tests or hand off the design directly to the dev team to get code and continue the app dev process
Issue: Starting New Projects Seems To Take Too Much Time
Getting a new project started often takes longer than expected, involving repetitive, low-value tasks —even something as simple as translating brainstorming from a whiteboard into a usable digital form. At the same time, even with tooling that can translate a back-of-the-napkin design into something you can communicate to your team or stakeholders, it probably is not usable past that one-and-done exercise.
Solution: Use UI Controls, Patterns and Templates to Kickstart the Process
With Indigo.Design, getting a project started is easy and efficient. Ultimately, time is the variable that we can give you back in the app design and dev process. Our internal analysis shows that teams are creating apps up to 10x faster with a design-to-code platform such as Indigo.Design.
You will find several time-saving options for kickstarting your design or dev process with Indigo.Design:
If you are starting with a design tool like Sketch, our UI kits include components, common UI patterns and pre-set screens. Your designers can pull together meaningful designs very quickly, no need to start with primitives that unnecessarily extend the design process.
Starting with Indigo.Design App Builder, you get several complete real-world business samples with different layouts, as well as a collection of pre-set layout templates that map to common navigation patterns. In the app construction process, you can use tools like copy/paste to quickly build the type of UI you are looking for, or use WYSIWYG drag and drop to create screens in no time.
Before showing to stakeholders, you have a one-click option to brand your design. You can choose to use the pre-built themes and typography (Material, Bootstrap & Fluent) included in Indigo.Design App Builder or the design UI Kits, or you can customize any component, screen, or entire app with your own corporate branding.
Issue: We Need a WYSIWIG Tool for Both Design and Development
Layout on the web is hard. Design tools tend to favor a free-for-all absolute positioning model where anything goes. This does not translate well into a meaningful, responsive UI, and can create a ton of headaches for developers, as their expertise is usually not in CSS and web layout. On top of this, the number of projects is so large, that even with design help, there is still a huge amount of time spent on the basics of HTML layout and creating screens for new apps.
Solution: Use an Intuitive WYSIWYG Drag and Drop Tool and Eliminate Hand Coding
Indigo.Design is a full-featured, web-based WYSIWYG drag & drop app designer. Layout is handled by the template you choose, and everything comes with a beautiful design so you don’t even need to know how to make your app look good – we do it automatically.
With Indigo.Design App Builder, you get:
A complete low-code multi-experience application delivery of mobile apps, progressive web apps, conversational apps, and immersive apps.
A cloud-based solution that eliminates the requirement to download a heavy IDE, or the need to install unknown 3rd party dependencies to create screens and apps.
An accessible web experience in the browser, so anyone on your team can access and participate in the app-building process.
An AI-powered engine that translates the absolute positioning of vector-based design tools to a standard Flex-based layout for the web.
Best of all, you can spend your precious time on the interactions, and the way your application looks & behaves - not the details of the code.
Issue: Errors and Miscommunications in the Design-to-Developer Handoff
Time is lost in so many places in the normal app development process. At times it feels like an endless cycle of missed deadlines, management frustration, and customers or stakeholders asking for status updates. The problem is compounded when deadlines are missed, and when the development team demonstrates the product, it does not map to customer expectations. Not only is time lost, but the burden is placed on developers to translate designs into code and to make constant updates to app design during the development phase (much more costly). The fault isn’t with anybody in particular: it’s caused by the usual siloed approach to the design-to-dev handoff.
Solution: Get Instant Preview and 1-Click Production-ready Code
When you use Indigo.Design, there is no difference between the design and the code. Whether you start from the App Builder, or your favorite design tool like Sketch, you are guaranteed an output of live, running code backed by commercial, enterprise-ready UI components. And this is not spaghetti code that you cannot edit or change. It is best practice, standards-based, clean code that any developer or architect will be proud of.
With Indigo.Design:
Instant-Preview of your app in the App Builder designer. No need to compile, or download anything, just switch between design and live view to see what your app will look like and how it will behave.
Everything you design results in production-ready HTML, TypeScript & CSS for Angular today and React, Web Components, Blazor in Q3, 2021.
Start with the App Builder and iterate on your design or start with Sketch and sync your design with the Indigo.Design cloud to iterate with your team and stakeholders.
With 1-Click, you can download a zip file with standards-based code that is ready for Visual Studio Code or your favorite IDE.
Indigo.Design App Builder is a brand-new cloud-based WYSIWYG drag & drop tool that helps teams design and build complete business apps faster than ever before. Part of Indigo.Design, the world’s only digital product design platform with a complete design-to-code solution
Get back the precious time you and your team are losing in the design and development process. Indigo.Design gives four concrete benefits that will accelerate app design and development, increase time to market, deliver ROI fast and best of all it will improve the overall satisfaction of your stakeholders and customers.
Build Apps Up to 10x Faster - With Indigo.Design, your team gets a single working environment. Managers, designers, and developers are not forced to use multiple tools to manage the single source of truth during the design process. Eliminating silos and reducing friction, miscommunication and expensive errors that usually occur in handoffs.
Complete Templates & Starter Layouts - Hit the ground running with one of our pre-built app templates or use one of our preset layout options to build your app in no time. Allowing manger to quickly sketch ideas in a common program early on to give guidance on app direction. Just tweak our design, swap a theme and you are done!
100% Cloud-Based WYSIWYG - Cloud-based, WYSIWYG drag & drop tool that helps teams design and build complete business apps faster than ever before. With compatibility to popular design tools like Sketch, Figma and Adobe XD, there is no need to download anything, no heavy IDE's, and no 3rd party dependencies to build apps blazing fast.
Instant Real-Time Preview - Preview and see your application's source code in real-time while you are building it. Then, when you are ready, quickly, and easily generate production-ready code and run it in Visual Studio Code or your favorite IDE Feel the interactions, see how it looks, and experience your app experience - instantly.
Contact us today at sales@infragistics.com to sign up for a free demo and learn how Indigo.Design with App Builder can drive results for you and your team.
