Why developers should code in Angular JS

If you are working on modern-day applications, identifying the right structural framework will be the first thing to do. Your app’s features and components depend a lot on the framework, thus making it imperative to choose the right one. Angular JS emerges as one of the best options here. By stretching and extending the HTML syntax, this particular framework helps you express your apps’ functionalities in a precise way.

Identifying its application

Angular JS finds application in numerous projects. When it comes to ensuring dynamic web app development, a majority of developers opt for Angular JS. Here are some of the projects where developers have used this framework:

• Video streaming applications

Netflix and YouTube for Sony PS3 are developed on this framework. Angular JS happens to be the first choice in these projects.

• Travel apps

There’s no denying the fact that Angular JS has an exceptional interface and dynamic features. These aspects make it the perfect option for travel app development.

• User-review apps

Every consumer checks reviews about a product before finalizing their purchases. Angular JS is the perfect framework for User-review app development.

Apart from these projects, Angular JS finds application in mobile ecommerce, social apps, and weather app development. However, the framework isn’t without a fair share of benefits and drawbacks. Here are some of them.

Pros and Cons

No matter which framework you choose, 100% functionality or performance is a far-fetched idea. Every platform or technology comes with certain advantages and disadvantages, which makes it complete.

The Pros of Angular JS

If you wish to take a look at the benefits of this framework, here are some of them:

• Quick delivery and prototyping of dashboard style thus enabling the creation of dynamic single-page apps.
• Swifter and simpler development compared to React, Backbone, and Knockout.
• Requires minimal coding
• Smooth testing
• Perfect for applications with interactive client-side coding
• Dependency injection systems
• Dual data-binding features
• Extends and stretches HTML coding
• Swift and hassle-free prototyping

With these benefits, Angular JS is undoubtedly the most preferred framework for developers. There are drawbacks as well, which developers should know about.

The cons of Angular JS

It’s easy to learn Angular JS in the basic stages. The moment you move towards the advanced stages, the learning curve turns out to be steep.

Some of the most popular and unique features of this framework are quite complex. First-time developers find it difficult working with values, factories, and DI.

• It’s very easy to utilize the scopes but tough to debug them.
• Documentation needs improvement.
• In spite of being dynamic and powerful, directives are highly difficult to operate with.
• After Bootstrap, developers will have a tough time configuring the framework.
• Limited router connections.
• Problems also exist in search engine indexing.

Significant development and improvement of these features can lead to proper functioning of this framework. Elimination of these issues will increase the strength, power, and usability of Angular JS.

Signing off

Although the platform has its share of disadvantages, Angular JS is the most dynamic option when it comes to web app development. You can surely create high-end apps with it!

User experience and UX design are integral segments of product development. Numerous enterprises across the world are embracing UX like never before! If current market stats are anything to go by, nearly 600 software experts have voted for agile development. It’s quite the trend now, and innumerable organizations are relying on it for improved UX.

However, a trivial issue pops up in this regard. Most of the UX designers and developers are getting confused with lean UX and agile UX. Since they are using both the terms in place of each other, things are getting more complex and difficult. While Agile started out with the mere assumption of user demands and feedback, Lean UX has taken the technology forward.

With UX designing turning out to be imperative for organizational success, it’s high time you develop crystal clear ideas of Lean and Agile UX as well as their differences.

Understanding Agile UX

Agile UX involves iterative, evolutionary, and incremental approaches. The entire process is classified into small divisions, tasks, or iterations and is executed within short terms. A dynamic and efficient team carries out all the iterations with cross-functional approaches in the following stages:

• Planning
• Requirement evaluation and analysis
• Design
• Coding
• Acceptance Testing
• Unit Testing

Every single iteration gets monitored by process developers. As each of these iterations end, stakeholders get to see the working version. These iterations lead to the final product which comes with minimal errors and issues.

With this brief introduction on Agile UX, it’s time to take a look at the features of Lean User Experience.

What’s Lean UX design?

Over the past decade, Lean UX has garnered huge popularity in the software and product development arena. It’s turned out to be the buzzword with innumerable users choosing it over the other UX design technologies. As an inexpensive, analytics-driven, and swift approach to uncover and develop exceptional usability, Lean UX revolutionizes UX design to a great extent. Lean UX works on three crucial principles that include:

• Unnecessary inconsistencies
• Wasted efforts
• Undesired and wasted outputs

If you own a tech company, you will surely not want to develop a product that’s of no practical use to your target users. It is here that developers need to be careful thus experimenting with their development process and technologies. Experimentation, user feedback, and iterative designs are always more important than detailed planning, intuition, and traditional designing. That is where Lean UX takes up the vital role.

Best practices involved in UX design

Collaboration within multiple teams happens to be of paramount significance. If you wish to take UX designing to the next level, here are some best practices to follow:

1. Fitting UX deliverables within agile timelines
2. Eliminating or reducing unrequired internal deliverables
3. Collaborating and partnering with non-UX members
4. Receiving consumer feedbacks at regular intervals

Parting thoughts-

Both Lean and Agile UX revolutionize product designing thus catering to the contemporary demands of the modern user. Your choice of these technologies will entirely depend on your user-base, their requirements, and your iterative capabilities.

Whether it’s a website or a product, users are the most crucial success drivers. They are the key factors determining a product’s usability and performance. While designing a product, even developers think about the use and application it’s going to have in users’ life. That speaks a lot about the significance of UX or User Experience design. Irrespective of what the product does or can do, it’s the benefits reaped by the users that matter the most!

So, what’s the general notion or thought process in this regard? Whenever we think of a product and its UX, we imagine a particular set of features that can make things easy and smooth for users. However, that’s just a part of the entire story. It is imperative to think about aspects within products which will lead to the identification of its true purpose.

That’s exactly what ‘Product Thinking’ means – identifying a product’s purpose

What does ‘product thinking’ mean?

Every developer has some objectives and goals in mind while creating a product or application. Say, for instance, the main purpose or objective behind creating the biggest cab service, Uber, is to reduce traveling hassles for commuters.

It’s here that product thinking comes into the picture. Every application or product has a core UX and its here that developers need to think when developing the products.

Why is ‘product thinking’ important?

What do you see when you book a taxi on Uber? You get real-time updates on the arrival of the vehicle along with the approximate time. These arrival updates or time schedules aren’t a part of the core UX. They are just additional features which enhance and improve the User Experience. What we get as the inference is that a product and its features share an interrelationship. The former supports the latter which is incomplete without the product.

Quite naturally, that compels developers to change their thought processes and development ideas. You need to think about the usability of a product and how it adds to the User Experience.

Here are some effective ways to strike a balance between the two:

How to engage in product thinking?

If you want to identify the importance of product thinking in UX designs, you will have to uncover the goals of the product. Try finding out its goals or the job it is expected to do. Every product meets users’ demands or fulfills a certain requirement. In other words, a product solves the user’s problems. If it fails to do so, the product loses its usability. For unmatched User Experience, developers will need to identify a product’s objectives and the problems solved by it.

1.     Identifying your target audience

Does your product cater to a particular group of people? Most of the products have their target audiences, and developers should know these audience groups. That will give you an idea of the purpose of your product.

2.     Strategy and vision

Always try to have a vision while working on product development. That will help you create and devise the right strategies. Once you achieve successful strategizing, it’s time for effective implementation.

Signing off

If you wish to improve the core UX, thinking in products will be of paramount significance. These tips will make your job a lot easier!

SCRUM forms a part of the agile software development framework that helps organizations with their technology product development. Having a simple framework, Scrum was originally used for the software development products, but now, most of the companies and organizations make use of this software framework for their complex and innovative projects.

Scrum, as a whole, provides a flexible development strategy, which is required mainly in the field of product development and maintenance, as the customer’s requirements and expectations are considered to be volatile. Rather than following the traditional mode of strategies and sequential development process, Scrum is able to provide the freedom of changing the software terms and the development process based on the requirements of the customers.

Benefits of using SCRUM methodology

SCRUM methodology is able to provide certain benefits for the teams, companies and their products and services, along with providing assistance for the individuals. Being an empirical software strategy, these benefits of Scrum will help you understand its function.

• Improved quality of product development

Using Scrum enables you to generate the required methodology for developing the complex products in the simple way. The software team receives real time input and feedback from the customers and using this, they are able to constantly update the system as and when required. This provides room for improvement of the product quality on an immediate basis.

• Faster delivery of projects

Compared to the traditional methodologies, Scrum is able to complete and deliver the projects about 40% faster to the customers. As just in time and real time updates are provided as the project is in progress, every change that requires to be done is executed immediately after the tester gets the information.

• High return of investment

This happens to be a continuation of the previous advantage of Scrum offering delivering projects in decreased time to market. Few defects that you encounter might cost your heavily, but the same can be remunerated easily. If there is a failure about to happen, it takes place in a fast rate, giving you the opportunity to save up on the cost you require to fix the damage.

• Building team characteristics

Being a self-managed form of software development system, Scrum provides a chance for the members in the team to be creative and be hands-on throughout the project. Decisions are taken by every individual on the team, thereby giving them self-sufficiency in doing the work.

• Generate required data

When using Scrum, the required metrics and the data for calculating the time and cost for the project and for taking other decisions are provided as and when required. Unlike other software systems generating the irrelevant data along with the relevant metrics, Scrum is able to distinguish and provide the developers the required information for completing the project.

The advantages that you can see while using Scrum methodology for product development has now made it one of the efficient and flexible software available in the market for developing and completing complex projects.

How to create an awesome Mobile Application

Mobile app installs by users worldwide is growing 5% YoY. Users download 8.8 apps on average per month. This shows the immense reach and penetration of mobile apps in our lives. However it is equally true that app uninstalls are also high. An average Android app loses 77% of its daily active users (DAUs) within the first three days of app download, and a staggering 90% within the first 30 days.

So, while app developers do see a lucrative landscape, they have to be careful to deliver a fuller experience so that they can bring down app abandonment and provide much better value to the users. Let’s see how this can be achieved with these 10 tips.

1.     Complete testing

Testing the application in every juncture will help you find the defects in your code and also provide a platform for you to develop a better mobile application based on the business needs and OS acceptance guidelines.

2.     Including offline features

Users are now trying to switch over to applications that provide them with some required features that can be accessed offline. It is required to add such offline features to the mobile application, as there is no guarantee that you would get a constant internet connection while on the go.

3.     Connecting with users

Get down and know what motivates the users to use a particular mobile application. Try to set up certain triggers in your mobile application that encourages the users to use the developed application on their device.

4.     Simple design

Test the application you have developed by allowing your friends or family members to use the same. Check if they are able to understand the tech additions in the applications and if they have some difficulty, try removing them from the design to keep things simple.

5.     Develop based on use

Usage of the Android and iOS users might vary, so try to develop the applications that suit the usage pattern of the users. Keep in mind to develop an application that best matches the OS.

6.     Ease of use of app

The application that you have developed must have the easy use and must not make things complicated for the users. People might have got the hang of using the mobile devices, but they might require help if things are going to turn technical and complex.

7.     Ease the user’s needs

The application that you have developed must be in a position to ease the user’s life. Make the design human-centered, as people use these applications to make things in life easy.

8.     Cover platforms

Try developing an application that works on a cross-platform basis. This way you will be able to cover a wide ground rather than sticking to a single platform with limited set of options.

9.     Choose a theme

Develop your application based on a theme rather than trying to add every feature of every other application. Stick to a single purpose and you will be able to have an easy time in developing the applications.

10.  Feature the real world

For a better user experience, applications that make use of features from the real life and certain aspects of the same will work wonders. This helps you to connect better with the users.

A good mobile app not only ranks high on functionality, but also in terms of user interface and its aesthetic appeal. So create the apps accordingly and get going!

Mobile commerce is growing by leaps and bounds. According to a report published by the leading newspaper Economic Times, 41% of India e-commerce sales are from mobile; this gives a true picture why Google is heading towards mobile responsive website. With improved ranking signals for mobile responsive website, we can say that such sites will help business grow and make search engine visibility soar.

Here are some reasons that why a mobile responsive website makes for a smart business move:-

• It enhances the user experience

we all understand the meaning of simple and friendly navigation, but Amazon.com has translated it within its website to make shopping a pleasant experience. Starting from compact header to larger search bar to addition of Fire and Kindle in drop down, the company has rolled out amazing features for people who are searching products through the mobile phone or tablet. As compared to previous design, now the products are listed in horizontal rows, so that the mobile users can swipe to left to right or right to left, which is one of the common forms of navigation for mobile phones and tablets. Definitely, a mobile responsive website is intuitive, appealing and easy to navigate.

• It increases your brand presence on social networking site

On September 2, 2016 Facebook made an announcement that if your website is not mobile friendly and yet you run advertising campaigns on Facebook..it is better to make your site mobile friendly soon! Unlike its contemporary Google, Facebook won’t penalize the users if they don’t make a mobile friendly website, but the ads will suffer. How? Well, today more and more people are browsing the internet through the mobile. However, since it’s a new channel many businesses are unaware about the benefits that it offers and still suffer from slow load time. This can lead to negative consumer experience, and problems for businessman like site abandonment, loss of turnover, missed business objective and inaccurate measurement of business goal. Can a business afford it?

• To rank your website high on search engine

Creating a website doesn’t guarantee results, it needs to be nurtured and watered constantly. The best way to improve the ranking of the website is to follow Google algorithm rules.  According to the recent update, Google has hammered down the sites that don’t have a mobile friendly design. The reasons cited are

–        74% of the consumers wait 5 seconds for web page load and after that they abandon the site

–        71% of the consumers expect web pages to load as fast as on their desktop computers

–        More than 25% of views on You Tube are from mobile devices

Hence, it becomes crucial to build a website that scores high in terms of responsiveness.

• To offer consistency

We are a slave of our habits and we always want consistency. Twitter is one among us. In September 2015, the company created a unified code for iPhone and iPad devices to remove any hiccups that the consumer face while operating both the devices. This seamless experience yielded consistency that the users demanded. Also, the mobile-friendly update did create the furore in the social networking industry.

Effects of Machine Learning on Social Media

What was once seen as a fiction in the scientific movies, has now become a reality- and its gaining popularity across the various sectors. Yes, we are talking about Artificial intelligence and machine learning. More and more companies are leveraging this technology to understand what the customer demands and engage for better success. Even the social marketing giant Twitter has joined the league.  The company has recently announced that it will now use insightful machine learning technology to recommend tweets to its users.

It’s no secret that social media has become a new way to conduct a business. Just have a look at these mind-boggling statistics. 1.65 billion of web-users that are active on social media, 96% of brands use social media and in 2015 Facebook prompted 52% of purchases online, 71% of the people who have good social media experience are likely refer the same to others. Not to mention, about the treasured lead information that is neatly packed in the profiles.

How machine learning is changing the social media revolution?

1. To improve the visual experience

As per the statistics, 82% of the twitter users watch video content and around 90% watch it on a hand held screen.  Hence, to improve the visual experience further, Twitter has announced to purchase Magic Pony Technology, a London based technology firm that has developed machine learning techniques for visual enhancement. This technology will help Twitter to automatically sharpen the video and images. As videos and live streaming are critical for the next generation social media, so we believe that this Twitter strategy should work to its advantage.

2. It helps the social networking giants to market their products to the targeted users

Facebook uses deep neural networks to decide which adverts needs to be shown to which users. By tasking this work to the machines, the company can free itself from labour intensive activities. These include collecting the data, clustering it in an insightful way, and serving the data in a way to maintain supremacy in their domain.

3. Protects the reputation and keeps the data safe

Today, even the big conglomerates are vulnerable to data spam, hence Pinterest has started using machine learning technology to its advantage. With it, the company can detect the spam content and the users, recommend the content and predict the likelihood that a person will pin the content, can monetize ad performance.

4. It helps to automate the data

Today there are 2.2 billon Google+ users, out of 111 million are active users and reaching out to so many users is always a concern. Hence, Google has followed the suite of machine learning through which it can automatically attach tags without further data input. The web giant actually wants to recognize abstract concepts (like sunset, beach) and attach metadata to it without the further mouse click.

Definitely, machine learning technology is stepping up its game and changing the future of social media trends and with its deep insights both the customers are getting benefited. Starting from big shops to small companies, everyone can use it to step up their competitive advantage and customer engagement objectives.

We are living in the age of tech revolution fast re-defining every sphere of the business landscape. From business processes and new discoveries to marketing and designing, there’s nothing where technology doesn’t play the pivotal role. Disruptive technologies like Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence have garnered huge attention. The world believes in augmented environments today, where experiences are real and unique.

Since designing is an integral part of VR solutions, a crucial question might pop up in your mind. What has designing to do with Virtual Reality? Do the present VR solutions and their design trends complement the existing environments? Or there is room for improvement? Here’s a take on the topic!

The difference between thoughts and application

When it comes to discussing VR, we should have two significant aspects in our minds. If the technology is the first essential factor, the solutions or experiences it drives is the second one. Over the last few years, the growth and development of VR technologies have been phenomenal. However, we can’t make similar statements about the VR experiences.

Thoughts on these solutions haven’t changed much. Designers should take the lead and identify the key factors while designing for VR. It’s also imperative to find out the challenges along with the right strategies to deal with them.

Understanding the 3D and immersive environments

The design sector is heading towards bright future with VR by its side. Even if you take a look at the 2D designs, you will surely come across the hard work, efforts, and thoughts that go into creating such stunning designs. That gives you a crystal clear idea of the efforts required to develop exceptional immersive experiences. It’s right here that you need to think about the environments and designing mediums:

• Environments: Are you designing for a 2D interface? Or is it a 3D medium. You should understand the true connotation of immersive experiences and identify the strategies to create them.
• Devices: The device plays a vital role in the entire design process. Are you designing for flat-screens or trying to create virtual experiences? The choice of devices will be highly important in this context.

ips to design better for VR

If you are planning to experiment with VR designs, here are some crucial tips to consider. Designers can follow them for exceptional results:

1.     Thinking like a human being

Virtual Reality is all about experiencing the real world. Try to develop a design model that interacts with your target audience and reflects abstract ideas. Human beings have come a long way in terms of cognitive capacities and thinking capabilities. Quite naturally, that should reflect in your designs.

2.     The importance of perspective

Designing involves perspective. A majority of designers create variations in color, size, and contrast. These factors have distinctive applications in VR designing, and you need to emphasize on perspectives for that.

3.     Scalability

Technology and innovations always have an upward growth curve. Make sure you build scalable solutions, experiences, and interfaces that improve with time.

With these tips in mind, you will surely create immersive, stunning, and engaging VR experiences for users.

Data analytics and AI aren’t just concepts or futuristic trends anymore. These disruptive technologies are integral parts of today’s processes, business strategies, and professional endeavors. Entrepreneurs should comprehend the importance of Artificial Intelligence and Big Data, thus looking for the right opportunities to leverage these technologies.

In today’s times, the growth, development, and application of AI have been phenomenal. From healthcare to marketing, AI has revolutionized various processes and how. If we talk about the marketing sector, Artificial Intelligence has been the key to improving processes and marketing strategies.

With numerous marketers including it in their existing marketing plans, AI has a long way to go. Let’s find out how Artificial Intelligence can change, diversify, and re-innovate the marketing sector.

How will AI act or react?

Market stats reveal a lot of information about the future of AI. If the reliable sources are to be believed, by the end of 2020, consumers will be responsible for managing almost 85% of business relationships. What is of paramount significance is that human interactions won’t be a part of these collaborations. With that in mind, it is high time marketers rethink their strategies and find out how AI can help them.

1.     Improving sales forecasting

Conversions are integral parts of effective marketing. If your marketing efforts are not fetching you huge sales or failing to convert your leads into potential consumers, it’s high time you integrate AI with the existing plans. Artificial Intelligence helps you strike a balance between side-by-side inbound conversations and conventional marketing metrics. Marketers will know about their prospects beforehand along with the idea of how to deal with them.

2.     Taking digital advertising to the next level

While creating digital marketing campaigns, crucial insights into consumer behavior, market analysis, and current trends will play a pivotal role. AI technologies and strategies can help you gain access to these insights thus taking your digital advertising efforts to the next level. By tapping into keyword search trends, online data, and social profiles, you can develop ideas of consumer preferences.

3.     Comprehending consumers

AI solutions have an innovative and unique power of identifying consumer preferences in real-time. You get to know what your customers are thinking about your brand, its objectives, and promotions. Artificial Intelligence solutions can also help you tap into the social media channels. You know what your consumers want, harness the information, and develop your marketing strategies accordingly.

4.     Real-time communications

There’s nothing more effective than communicating with your consumers in real time. Direct interactions are critical to understanding your customers in a better way. You can engage in meaningful conversations and find out what your consumers think about your brand. Quite naturally, that will give you an idea of the ongoing trends thus helping you develop effective marketing strategies.

Signing off

Successful and targeted marketing is the key to establishing your brand, earning huge profits, and achieving your sales goals. With the right AI solutions by your side, you can achieve that within the shortest time span!

As a buzzword, Design Thinking is taking the world of creatives and business by storm. A relatively new concept, design thinking involves tackling the unknown variables in solving complex issues.  The crux of the subject is to take into account human consideration (empathize) and create multiple solution constructs (holistic/ collaborative). Some of the business use cases might include –

1 – Generating a totally new revenue stream from new product or service or innovation in existing lineup

2 – Solving a social problem that can lead to a greater good (e.g. water conservation efforts from government agencies)

3 – Elevate the user experience on a particular gadget or device (e.g. mobile app design UI/UX)

Design Thinking: The Key Steps

There are 5 steps in the entire design thinking process. These are –

1 – Empathize – Gain an understanding of the problem you are trying to solve and the people/market for whom you will be solving the problem.

2 – Define – The information collected during your briefing, user challenges, and other information collected in the ‘Empathize’ stage to define the problem statement.

3 – Ideate – Here’s where the million-dollar creative thinking part happens. All existing solutions are disregarded, and new ideas and innovative thinking are encouraged.

4 – Prototype – From a list of ideas generated in the previous stage, pick a handful and take it to the next level of prototyping – i.e. creating a tangible solution.

5 – Testing – Assessing the prototypes in real-world situation amongst real world participants is the last step of the design thinking process.

How can design thinking be implemented in real life?

In real life, applying design thinking is all about creating a sense of balance and harmony. At a very broad level, you can get answers to these questions to make a positive difference to your existing life –

1. What components make up your life (career, personal, ambition, achievements)?
2. What components do you want to add, subtract, replace, or keep?
3. How can you change your daily routine to make a better impact on your life?
4. How can you reinvent your life?

Let’s look at a practical approach to this –

1 – Maintain an activity journal

In order to understand what you need to retain, add or replace from among the different components in your life, you need to know what components comprise of your life. You can maintain a journal that contains details on activities that –

• Make you stressful
• Make you content
• You are happy to be involved 100% in
• Pump you up
• Drain your energy

This will give a glimpse of which activities impact you in what way so that you know what components you can retain, replace, or add to your life.

2 – Define your problem

Once you have collected information in stage 1 above, you know how your current life is structured. Now you need to define the problem factoring in these dynamics. Your problem can be

• How can I add a new revenue stream to my life?
• How can I plan a grand Europe vacation?
• What skills will I need to embrace to have a rewarding career?
• How can I keep up my energy levels throughout the day?

3 – Ideate

As opposed to knowing pre-defined outcomes with known variables, with life it is a bit different. You don’t know what will come up in the future and hence you need to find your way with the unknown variables of your future. You may know what you like or dislike or what saps your energy, but not much more than that. You can ideate on the possible ways that you can take to achieve a larger objective (i.e. resolving the problem statement). It’s not necessary that the first idea will lead you to accomplish your larger objective.

4 – Prototype and test

Take your ideas one step ahead and carve out real world solutions to addressing the problems. Again the first round may not yield the expected results. The key is to keep re-engineering, fine-tuning, testing, and assessing the outcomes till you are satisfied.

Know of any practical use cases of applying design thinking in real life?  Do write to us and let us know your views.