Experts estimate that in 2016 almost a third of all smartphone users will have a low-end device. Apple reduced their number of orders, because the company couldn’t sell as many iPhone 5 devices as they had estimated. My guess is that people increasingly tend to buy cheaper mobile phones, because a phone is easily broken or lost and budget smartphones often offer a lot of the functionality that high-end devices include. What are the reasons for buying an expensive smartphone in this case? What this means to us UX designers is clear – the customer wants to reduce cost in all steps of product development including apps. So my advice is to use prototyping software. This might sound contradictory – why spend money on prototyping software, when this blog is about reducing costs? Prototyping software helps to conceptualize a product.
Before starting to program an operating system it is a good idea to have a reliable and well thought-out concept of the end product. Prototyping tools (synonym for prototyping software) are geared to designing interactive prototypes. These wireframes can be revised as often as needed. Maybe the customer wants something different or your colleague has a cool idea to improve the UI design. You then don’t have to rewrite all your code. With prototyping software, prototypes are easily built and even fundamental changes in the interface design are quickly applied without much effort. The wireframes can also be used for testing purposes. All these steps in the phase of conceptualization make sure you have a well performing product in the end. Basically, you detect mistakes in the user interface design before they have become reality.
