Here at Kumulos (Backend as a Service), we’re always looking to reinforce to the app developers using our mobile backend as a service that design in an app is a critical element in making a successful app. Without good design, you could have the greatest app idea in the world, but if it’s hidden behind a clunky, unintuitive UI, well it’s unlikely you’ll see it leap out the gates.
How do you design a good app though? Really?
At the moment you have 2 choices really, you can either use the in program app designers that aren’t going to give you a proper idea of what your app is going to look like. Or you can sketch it out on paper and then try to translate it in to an app, but as we all know, as intuitive paper is for getting the initial idea out, it’s a pain to work out just how it’s all going to look and feel as an app.
Well, now there’s an alternative.
POP (short for Prototyping On Paper) is an iPhone app to bring those doodles you made on the back of a napkin in the bar that one night to life as an app prototype. All you do is sketch out your design on paper, take a picture of it with your phone using the app then add links on your pencilled in buttons and you can instantly start navigating around your app as you would in the final version.
This service is invaluable to begin to see how you want your app to flow together and you can spot dead ends and screens that don’t fit or need adjusting as they stand in your prototype.
The company behind POP is a Taiwanese start-up called Woomoo based out of Taipei. It was founded by 3 self-taught developers: Ben, who dropped out of both high school and University and then founded his first start up at 27, Leo who founded his first start-up after he graduated from university, and Wraecca, who has been a drummer in a band, the military, a start-up founder and a self-taught coder in his time.
Together they formed Woomoo, and the idea for POP came around in much the same way all the best apps do; they were trying to solve a problem and found a solution that no one else had thought of yet.
As an app developing studio, Woomoo were trying to find a quicker and easier way to prototype apps when they were in the initial design stages.
Says co-founder Ben:
“We ended up with just paper and pencil, which is spontaneously intuitive… but that still didn’t solve our problem, we can only guess how it works on the iPhone. Someday an idea just popped out of my head, “Why not just take photos of them and make hotspots on them so those mockups can be tappable and be simulated on the iPhone.”
After that the idea quickly gained ground and they made the service for themselves before realising that they had a service they could sell to other developers.
This is incidentally very similar as to how Kumulos and our mobile backend as a service came around. Two years ago Waracle were in need of a backend platform that they could develop client apps on without always having to make bespoke mobile backends for each app. After much tinkering and stabs in the dark, the initial prototype of a mobile backend as a service as we know it today was born.
At the time we didn’t know what exactly we had created and just kept it within the company, but we quickly realised that the advantages that a mobile backend as a service brings to the development table was something we couldn’t sit on during the continuing explosion of the app market.
And so we are here today, bringing you, the developers, our services to make sure your development goes as smoothly as possible. POP’s service in combination with our mobile backend as a service would be a killer combination, saving you boatloads of time and frustration and streamlining your whole process into one that means you can get your app from concept to launch in a fraction of the time.
If you want to check out POP, you can head over their website here.
As always, if you’re a developer looking to make an app, or you’re already in the process of it and you’re having some trouble, or you just want to give the project a speed boost, talk to us at Kumulos about our mobile backend as a service.
Time is money, and we can save you both.
