5 Tips for Web Application Development

Web application development plays a crucial role in the modern business. Developing a web application can be more challenging than designing websites. Web application developers usually have their task cut out as they have to anticipate the user’s behavior and then design a user experience that will make the user’s job easier. A study conducted by Forrester has explained that The software you deploy, and especially the custom software you create, will increasingly be part of your competitive edge. Business enterprises that innovate quickly and create web applications with the best user interface (UI) usually have a competitive advantage.

But web application development is becoming more and more complex with each passing day. A vast knowledge base in the areas of security, UI design, integration, programming languages, backend databases and more are required for developing the perfect web application. A web app that is unintuitive, difficult to figure out and inefficient will not be accepted by the users. Designing an app with a friendly user interface can be hard as apart from the design problems such as proper content structure and picking the right colors, business enterprises also need to look at the bigger picture.

Here are the tips for web application development:

1) Create Clear Specifications:

A large number of business enterprises initiate web application development project without having a clear requirements specification. This results in a loss of huge amounts of money in the development process. Without a clear and constant goal, web application developers have no idea what they are aiming for which leads to loss of time and money. Business enterprises must make an effort to chart out the web application technical and functionality specifications that the web application will need to accomplish which can provide clear direction to the project and helps the enterprise in focusing on setting and achieving their goals. Creating the specifications can prevent future misunderstandings and confusion regarding project functionalities and features by both project stakeholders and developers.

2) Check out other UIs and Websites for Inspiration:

Any web application can perform its tasks efficiently only if it is designed in such a way that it meets the essential needs of the user with a responsive, simple and easy-to-use interface. While designing a new project some developers get stuck at some critical juncture of the development process and need a little inspiration. But design galleries that are available mainly focus on websites and not web application. Different design patterns are followed by marketing websites and are therefore not helpful for inspiration.

Developers must make a note of inspirational examples and ideas that they come across on the web such as interactive components which includes the way a button feels when it is pressed or the image uploading feature of the app, the general design theme and sensibility and the color scheme used at various places. This collection of inspiring web application designs and user interfaces can be helpful for the developers in designing web apps which have the most effective UI components and carry out given tasks with ease.

3) Use Simple and Powerful Tooltips:

A tooltip is a hint or message that appears over an icon, hyperlink or image when a cursor is positioned over it in a graphical user interface. It is essential that not all widgets in the web application have the tooltip option as some icons effortlessly communicate what its functions are and therefore no additional information might be required. But sometimes users will expect all the widgets to have tooltips and if no tooltips present when they move the cursor over something, it can lead to bad user experience.

But ideally, tooltips provides users with an opportunity to understand the system by exploring the different icons that are present in the web application without affecting their experience. Users can feel immersed in the experience when they are learning the functionalities of the different icons on the web application.

4) Use Third Party APIs Cautiously:

Today, there are numerous application program interfaces (APIs) present in the public domain that allows business enterprises to incorporate any functionality into their web applications. An incredible amount of resources are made available to the business enterprises by the APIs but enterprises must practice caution while using them. All APIs are not the same. Choosing the wrong API can significantly affect the web application’s performance.

The best APIs are the ones which provide good documentation and conform to industry standards and best practices with regard to data interaction and they also support multiple programming languages such as Ruby, PHP, Python, etc. Even if enterprises go ahead with using an API, any changes in the terms of use can significantly cripple the web application. Changes in third party APIs which can happen at any time can drastically affect the success of the web application.

5) Use a Template or a Framework:

Business enterprises can choose to build a web application from scratch or they can invest in a pre-built template which can be modified to suit their needs. The template provides a design on which the enterprise would have spent weeks to build it from scratch. The main focus should be on modification and not ground-up creation. The instances where such templates are feasible, it can potentially save thousands of dollars in development cost. A joint study by Oxford University and McKinsey found that in software projects a budget over run of 66% is witnessed and 33% of them go over schedule.

Having a development framework can help the web application developers to reduce the amount of written code, reuse code, develop a cleaner code and provide proper separation between data, presentation and logic layers. This can produce long lasting cost saving advantages as web applications that are built with a proper framework can be easily maintained and transfer of ownership from one developer to another can be done far more easily.

Irrespective of designing a web application or a website, the end goal must remain the same-to give users the best possible experience from the moment they first enter the user interface till the moment they leave. User experience can determine if a product gets accepted in the market or not. Users will settle for nothing less than perfect and will simply move to the competition if the user experience does not meet their expectations. By following the above given tips, development teams in business enterprises can effectively improve productivity. The ability of a business enterprise to build and deploy web applications quickly can have a great impact on their competitive advantage.