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Evolving business app development with drag and drop UI builders

Blog: NASSCOM Official Blog

Evolving to the highest level of abstraction

It wasn’t until the release of the computer mouse and the gradual launch of GUI that the number of computer users increased significantly in the 1980s-1990s. With the rising internet-awareness, globally the number of internet users increased from 413 million in the early 2000s to over 3.4 billion in 2016. Having an internet/digital presence changed from an option to a prerequisite. Website development for both individuals and businesses went through a rollercoaster of changes from HTML 2.0, to the advent of drag and drop front-end builders that took away multiple levels of abstraction from the development phase.

Way back in the day, we didn’t have fancy drag and drop systems and if we wanted to move things on the screen from left to right, we would have to go to a developer who understands the code behind the product. There did not use to be a “grab it with a mouse click and drop it where you need”.

 

We’ve come a long way since then!

 

From keyboard-only to point-and-click and now drag-and-drop, we’ve come a long way. This journey also indicates our preference for solutions that offer higher levels of abstraction to take us to our aim as quickly as possible.

Today getting a website up and running has become a matter of days and not months just by dragging and dropping the right elements on a canvas. More and more businesses are now empowered to quickly have a digital presence in the form of a website.

Mobile app development has not been slow in picking up the drag and drop trend. We now have the ability to convert our ideas into a working model within hours by dragging an object, dropping it on the screen where we want to place it and it’s done.

The drag and drop systems today are so sophisticated that we can design and speed up deployment of our app or web projects in matters of hours using drag and drop tools that are intuitive and powerful.

When starting a new project/website/blog/app/etc., many beginners used to find it difficult to get to their first prototype ready without incurring high costs or long duration of time, or both. Same was the scenario even for seasonal veterans who need to get their ideas and plans up and running in shorter time cycles and low costs.

 

Drag and drop builders have changed the game.

Hundreds of thousands of users are now reaping the benefits and convenience of using drag and drop technology.  The key advantages of drag and drop tools offer are:

 

  1. Prototype within hours –Drag and drop tools enable you to quickly build the front end of your website or app that the user will interact with. This enables business users and knowledge workers to get involved in the solution development process to ensure the end product meets exactly what the problem requires.
  2. Instant visibility into the results of your actions – Drag and drop tools bring with them the beauty of WYSIWYG. (What you see is what you get). There is no mystery anymore on what is going on with your application as it only involves selection and dragging of an element from an element kit, repository and dropping it to the screen. You can see exactly how it looks, how the data transfers on the screen. Whenever you move something you immediately see its impact. It is as easy as playing with building blocks; the same blocks will let you go from simple to complex structures.
  3. No technical or coding expertise necessary– For a lot of people, interaction with computers stops at excel and emails. They feel computers are only for the technical. While that is an image that has often been portrayed in the movies, the real reason is the lack of confidence or the awareness about the vast possibilities of drag & drop, no-coding-required solutions. Drag and drop interfaces were created with the aim to give more people an opportunity to leverage the abilities of modern development technologies. Whether you are an experienced developer or you don’t have technical experience, you can create your applications without any knowledge about codes.
  4. Speed and Simplicity– The drag and drop builders are designed to empower tech and non-tech users alike to turn the idea or plan in their mind to an actual working application or website. To suffice that, the builders need to be intuitive and easy to have a short learning curve for the users.
  5. Flexibility to modify – The greatest advantage of drag and drop builders is the ability to re-structure as and when required without the need to spend any extra money over it or calling in a specialist. From time-to-time, the nature of your business changes, new regulations, new company policies, changing consumption patterns, and so on. This calls for freedom to modify your applications, change the appearance, add and remove blocks, and not lose time over it.

Platforms unimaginable years ago, now you see 100s of them in a day. Sure, each and every one of these tools has gone through a learning and development curve on itself. Like human evolution, application builders have gone from clunky systems and limiting functionality to robust, complex capabilities.

Get responsive apps

With no shortage of options to select from, the best drag and drop builders tend to be similar, intuitive and user-friendly. You can make forms out of them to capture leads, sign-ups, surveys, requests, or new orders. Some builders will even let you add conditions and rules to hide or show form elements in your application in order to control the data that gets collected from these apps. Whether you are trying to make a form-based application or a dashboard kind, drag and drop builders are the easiest, fastest way to get there with all the different forms and visual fields, colours, size, border, background options to choose from. While most of these platforms will give complete flexibility to design your applications, their capabilities stop at the front-end.

DronaHQ’s drag and drop UI builder is one of the most powerful and advanced builders out there to create applications that are responsive. The platform not only provides drag and drop for the front-end, but it also works for the back end. You can drag, drop and bind UI elements to the database, visually design workflows, trigger third-party events and a whole lot more.

The features combined lay the foundation of a successful, robust, scalable application with all the security standards met to give you more confidence in your end product.

You can set reminders, schedule events, assign tasks and automate approval with a visual workflow designer that assists in total business process automation. The tool lets you map out each element of the form or dashboard to a spreadsheet-like database where the responses get collected at or the data is picked up from to display.

While it is one of the most advanced tools out there, the team behind the product itself needed a quick, easy to understand tool to assist them in their processes and that is exactly what the platform represents – a user-friendly tool to let you build any application without the need to code. The applications you create can run on any device you want them to run on, online or offline.

Have you tried using such drag & drop tools for a task of yours? If you haven’t, you are lagging with the current trends and missing on a technology breakthrough that can make your digital goals easily achievable, faster than ever.

The post Evolving business app development with drag and drop UI builders appeared first on NASSCOM Community |The Official Community of Indian IT Industry.

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