Step 1 : Design Your Application
“Design is a way of life, a point of view. It involves the whole complex of visual communications: talent, creative ability, manual skill, and technical knowledge. aesthetics and economics, technology and psychology are intrinsically related to the process.” – Paul Rand, an American art director and graphic designer –
Why is the design so important?
If you have decided to build an app, coming up with something that is able to respond to customers’ needs perfectly, easy to use and can be the difference between standing out and simply making up the numbers. That something is an amazing application design.
Beautiful interfaces, striking simplicity, and easy to navigate are the most prominent traits in a great app. If your customers or users can understand the app purpose and thought it out by themselves without any questions, you can release that your business is one step closer to success.
How do you build a great app design?
We would you walk through the process of how to design an app below to make sure that you will definitely get a great application;
- Sketch your app idea
The starting point of every application is from an idea. It doesn’t need to be big, ground-breaking or clever. Just an idea is good enough. Sketch out your app idea with pen and paper. The goal is to make the idea tangible. You define how your app works and what its features are before you start developing the app. It’s as simple as that.
Example of designing application
When you make an app, the app needs to be as lean and mean as possible. And, it’s the first, simplest version of your app. When you focus on what matters most, you speed up your app development process and make your app more resilient against setbacks.
- Do the research and find customer preferences
The research sometimes is skipped by app developers, even though it’s an important part of making an app. You would save a lot of time and effort down the line by doing research up front. You should ask the questions like: What do potential customers want? What are their needs and desires? What’s a good business model? If you can answer all these questions clearly, it would help.
Finding insights also serves another purpose. You want to walk in the shoes of your users, so to speak and understand them. Instead of assessing needs and desires while sitting safely in front of your computer, you want to get out there and talk to people.
- Create mockup of your app
It’s best to make mockups before you start to build an actual app. A mockup is a rough sketch of your app’s layout, storyboard and data flow. A mockup shows you what an app looks like, without distracting you with unnecessary details. It’s a functional approach to your app’s design. Also, you should prepare the APIs that will be used on the app. Write down the functions of the API before registering on Service Gateway.
Example of app storyboard
A mockup should also describe the flow of data and interactions of your app. What happens when you tap on that button? How do you get from screen A to screen B? What is the navigation flow of your app?
- Make a graphic design
Now it’s time for your app graphic design includes pixel-perfect visual details, graphic effects, image assets, and sometimes even animations and motion design. These would be ready to use when you start building an application on DMA Manager.
The app design process may seem complex, but if you follow this guide and break it up into small manageable steps, it will get much easier.