Design and Build Real Apps Blazing Fast

An App Builder is a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) get productivity tool that lets you to drag and drop a pre-determined set of UI controls and components from a toolbox onto a design surface, and then you can arrange those UI controls however you would like on the design surface to represent the user interface of your application. With an App Builder, you do not have to hand code every aspect of the user interface of your application. The reason to use an App Builder is you get usable, high-quality code output from whatever design you come up with. An App Builder can save significant time and money when building applications, as your development team is not forced to hand-code every aspect of your applications UI.

Indigo.Design App Builder is a web-based WYSIWYG tool that helps you rapidly create screens or entire applications by dragging UI controls onto a design surface to create the UX of your application. Indigo.Design App Builder includes typical app building features like data binding and theming, but also unique design features like support for importing designs from tools like Sketch, Adobe XD and Figma so you can use your existing designs to build apps. No matter what you design, you are guaranteed pixel-perfect design to code output in the Angular framework. Indigo.Design App Builder includes pre-design application templates and common layout templates that make it easy to get started. You do not need to be an expert in UI design to web design to create simple, beautiful experiences with the Indigo.Design App Builder.

Drag and Drop App Builders are a tool that enables RAD (rapid application development) creation of apps with simple drag and drop. Using a drag and drop App Builder, the designer, developer or power users is usually presented with a Toolbox of UI controls, a Design Surface and a Properties Editor. These three features are what make up the core experience of a drag and drop App Builder. Anyone can use an App Builder to create screens or entire applications. Using the built-in templates and pre-defined layouts in a drag and drop App Builder, there is no need to become and expert in the nuances of UI design – drag and drop App Builder tools remove the complexity of screen design and deliver a fast, modern experience for application construction.

A WYSIWYG, or “What You See is What You Get” App Builder will do exactly what its name implies – the screens you create by dragging and dropping UI controls onto a design surface will be “what you get” in the resulting app. You can arrange and move UI controls around to fit the needs of your design, and whatever that looks like will be represented exactly to the pixel on the design surface of the App Builder and in the code output of the App Builder. Using a WYSIWYG App Builder is essential to prototyping or design applications fast and can save development teams, product managers or designers days and weeks of potentially error-prone hand-coding of every screen and interaction in your application.

Creating an application without coding is possible using a WYSIWYG App Builder. Using an App Builder, you should be able to generate clean, usable code that can be used directly in your code editors to create an application. Using simple drag and drop of UI controls from a Toolbox to a Design Surface, it is easy to create an app without coding with an App Builder, however, since App Builders can fall into the category of either Low Code or No Code tools, it is important to understand the difference. The purpose of a low-code App Builder like Indigo.Design App Builder is to save you large amounts of time and money that you would usually spend hand-coding every aspect of your user interface. With an App Builder, you do not need to be an expert in how application construction works, you can simply use the WYSIWYG drag and drop editor to create full-featured, interactive screens.

The Indigo.Design App Builder is good for app testing since anything you design in the App Builder can be used to launch a user test. Using Indigo.Design, a complete digital product design platform, includes features include interactive prototyping, user testing, team collaboration, stakeholder feedback loops, design to code and app building. As you create prototypes with Indigo.Design, you can test these with users with the User Testing function, which enables collaboration with stakeholders, as well as in-depth analytics on what a user did, how long it took them to complete tasks and even video and audio recordings of their user testing journey.

Developer handoff is arguably the most critical part of the iterative design process, but especially the design to code part of that process. In the developer handoff phase, the designer or design team will send, or ‘handoff’ their design to the development team. Typical, this is in the form of digitally produced screens (from a tool like Adobe Photoshop) or an advanced vector graphics design tool like Sketch, Figma or Adobe XD. The reason this aspect of the iterative design process is so critical is that it is potentially the most error prone. Designers and developers use different tools. Developers usually do not have expertise is design tooling, so they are asked to replicate the design they are handed in the developer tools they use. It is here where mistakes happen. Using a digital product design platform like Indigo.Design ensures that developer handoff mistakes are avoided and going from design to code can produce pixel-perfect code without needing development teams to manually recreate a design.

Indigo.Design App Builder is one part of the Indigo.Design Digital Product Design Platform. With Indigo.Design, you can dramatically improve designer-developer collaboration within your teams as you work on prototypes, as well as improving collaboration with stakeholders. Any design or protype can be shared with a simple URL, and with the discussion and feedback tools in Indigo.Design, you can get real-time feedback from design and development teams as well stakeholders as they experience your prototype. During the user testing process, Indigo.Design includes real-time analytics and dashboards that show how a user is experiencing the application, the issues they are having, and the direct feedback on features they wish to share. Designer-developer collaboration is a key aspect of any iterative design process, Indigo.Design helps facilitate this designer-developer collaboration with its built-in tools.