Infragistics Completes Multi-Year, $12M Journey to Bring Together Core Components of App Building–UI Design and Prototyping, Remote User Testing, Iteration and Code Generation–Into a Single Platform
Indigo.Design, the digital product design platform that streamlines app creation from design to code, announced the release of its complete design-to-code system. The cloud-based platform addresses key issues that prevent widespread enterprise adoption of low-code applications. Namely, to create mission critical enterprise apps, low-code apps must prioritize user experience (UX) by beginning the app creation process with user interface (UI) design. Indigo.Design achieves this by bringing together the core components of the app creation process into a low-code tool: UI prototyping and design, app building, virtual user testing, iteration and finally, code generation.
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The greater promise of low-code apps is their potential to help enterprises scale fast without necessarily scaling their development teams. Available low-code apps, however, don’t address one of the primary sources of demand on developers: the user interface. According to market research firm Gartner, creating the user interface (UI) typically makes up 60% of application development time. As a result, mistakes during designer-to-developer hand-offs can cost a factor of 10x once an application is deployed.
Indigo.Design provides designers and developers a common cloud-based platform to build and iterate UI/UX designs in real time, all while using the design tools they prefer. The platform spans and streamlines the entire app creation process, from design to code, eliminating common missteps that prevent applications from getting to market quickly.
Gartner has been vocal about both the opportunity and the barriers to entry for wide adoption of low-code tools by enterprises.
Indigo.Design is recognized as a Representative Provider in Gartner’s report, ‘Technology Insight for Digital Product Design Platform’, Brent Stewart, Van Baker, Magnus Revang, November 24, 2020.
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Indigo.Design integrates UI and UX best practices throughout the five major steps leading up to final development in the app creation process:
- Create UI prototypes. Build interactive prototypes with a complete design system that includes usable components, 60+ UI controls, pre-built app templates and preset layout and design pattern options. Or, import your own custom designs from Sketch. (Coming soon: Adobe XD and Figma)
- Build the app. Indigo.Design’s App Builder is a first-of-its-kind WYSIWYG drag & drop tool for developers. With an intuitive UI, teams can design screens and build apps up to 80% faster than hand-coding.
- Test the app from any location before coding. Conduct unlimited, unmoderated, remote user testing and get stakeholder feedback early, before coding, to avoid costly iterations with your development team. Get screen-by-screen and video analytics to ensure your design is right before handing it off to developers.
- Preview your app and code in real time. Designers can see and experience their live running apps and real-time source code during design, letting them iterate with design without writing a single line of code.
- Generate code. Once their UI is pixel-perfect, users can transform their designs into clean, production-ready HTML, TypeScript and CSS for Angular to hand off to developers. (Coming soon: React, Web Components and Blazor)
According to Gartner, “Digital product design platforms have become the most important user experience (UX) tools — consolidating critical features such as screen design, user flows, prototyping, design collaboration and code generation”. The key findings of the report include, “With the introduction of design system management features, digital product design platforms are poised to become the single source of truth for reusable, tokenized design assets and presentation layer code components.”
The Indigo.Design design-to-code system is currently in use by Fortune 500 enterprise organizations including HP Enterprise, Morgan Stanley, and Tech Mahindra.
“Most low-code tools on the market focus on going from idea to app by skipping the designer and much of the developer. That’s a good way to get a concept out of your head and come up with a prototype. But to create a mission critical business app with a good user experience, low-code apps on their own won’t cut it,” said Jason Beres, Head of Indigo.Design at Infragistics. “Indigo.Design provides a single common platform for collaborative app design and development. This approach preserves necessary steps in the product development process while empowering and enabling designers and developers to streamline app creation, from design to code.”
Indigo.Design is one of the first major releases from the Infragistics Innovation Lab, which has formally invested more than $12M to bring the entire design-to-code system to market. The platform has been in early use by more than 25 companies since 2018.
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