Design Innovation for Entrepreneurs: What it Really Means to Innovate
One example is an app we built to do user flow: Overflow. Users can learn it in minutes and easily put together a complete user flow in no time. That user flow doesn’t require you to learn how to prototype a mobile app or master all the different types of fields, objects, and connections in a flowcharting program. It has the key functions needed to get the job done, as it’s optimized for ease of use and speed.
Sharing that flow is just as easy. Once you finish putting it together, just share a link with your team. They can see everything on one page, and easily experience the flow an actual user would take through the app. This practice makes it ideal for anything from brainstorming, to finalizing your mobile app design, to pitching your app idea to investors.
Give Your Mobile Design Team the Freedom to Experiment
To deliver design innovation, your team needs to be able to try new things — and they need to be able to fail. But for many companies, experimentation is just too costly to be realistic. They can speculate about different designs, but there’s only so much they can do to vet new ideas before sending them to the developers. And once an app reaches the development stage, the cost of getting the design wrong skyrockets.
Mobile app entrepreneurs, designers, and developers need to start integrating high-fidelity prototyping into their process. By creating playable prototypes, your team can test, refine, and perfect the app before it gets to the development stage. That makes it easy to investigate creative alternate solutions without delaying your development cycle.
Proto.io supports mobile app prototyping across all design stages, from sketching to creating a prototype that’s almost indistinguishable from the final product. This enables you to give your team more freedom to experiment, while simultaneously accelerating your development process.
But getting the right prototyping tool is only the start. To fully empower your team to innovate, you’ll probably need to change your internal workflow. You’ll want to start user testing earlier in the process, so you can find bugs early, rather than waiting to scout them out in QA.
You also may want to move toward a more collaborative style of product development, where designers, developers and other stakeholders work together across the whole process.
Your designers and developers have different areas of expertise and different ways of problem-solving. By putting them together early in the process, you’ll be able to benefit from the creative interplay between different team members, for a better, more innovative app.
Bring Design Innovation to Your Apps
Innovation may not always be sufficient to make your apps succeed, but it’s definitely necessary. Proto.io can help you unleash your team’s innovation — for a better app, a more successful company, and happier users.
Proto.io lets anyone build mobile app prototypes that feel real. No coding or design skills required. Bring your ideas to life quickly! Sign up for a free 15-day trial of Proto.io today and get started on your next mobile app design.
Have a favorite innovation tip for mobile entrepreneurs? Let us know by tweeting us @Protoio!