Software Development Company in New York Focuses on Usability and Product Readiness

Effective custom application development companies would be easy to find if the only requirement was coding and programming competence, but unfortunately that is not the case. The reality is that good, well-designed custom applications need much, much more than just quality code, and few companies manage to offer everything that’s necessary.

Outstanding developers understand not just the mechanics of executing an application correctly — you don’t have to look deeper than your local college’s Computer Science program to find that — they also thoroughly understand both your business and the end users of the application. Even with that understanding, they still need to have usability and security testing  in place to make sure that your application meets product readiness standards before it hits the market.

Take, for example, our New York company, Applied Visions. Our company meets all the usual requirements of a solid, custom application development company: quality programmers, end-to-end development services, and maintenance and support options. But over the years, we have also come to understand how much usability and security factor into making an application ready for market.

Usability essential for market acceptance

The truth is, users simply don’t do you what you expect them to do. They constantly surprise developers. Take the recent example of users completely blindsiding Microsoft — certainly a company with plenty of application development experience — within a day of the release of Tay, their artificially intelligent Twitter chat bot. The idea was to create something to engage with users in a fun, playful way, while also learning about the way people communicate online. This sounds like a cool idea, except the users infamously surprised the development team by communicating with it using racist, anti-Semitic, misogynistic language, which it began to parrot. Within a single day, it had to be taken down and revamped to prevent further embarrassment.

While it’s extremely unlikely that an application you want to develop will turn out so spectacularly poorly, the fact remains that Tay’s failure is a prime example of a mistake that any of us could make by not testing usability first. The lesson here is that companies need to manage their testing and market research appropriately. It’s not just about whether or not your product works as intended, it’s also whether your product can be used for an unintended purpose.

Here at Applied Visions, we never assume that users will behave as expected, and we make sure to plan appropriately. We’ve employed usability experts whose entire role is to ensure that the application is easy for users to navigate, and also to anticipate and test how people will end up using it. This makes any application our team develops not just something that won’t cause embarrassment, but a product that meets or exceeds users’ expectations.

Tay’s unanticipated fail also represents a security risk. A significant concern in the industry is that applications used in unintended ways can compromise the integrity of the application’s security. Since Tay was a simple chat bot, the impact of a comprehensive failure on this level was relatively minor — an embarrassment, mostly. But if a different application — a chat system that enabled commerce, for example — were compromised in a similar way, then the damage caused could be immeasurably higher. 

Our testing process pinpoints potential security issues and stops them before the final release. We even developed an entire vulnerability management application, Code Dx, to track and eliminate these threats. 

The other side of testing and end-to-end development is anticipating what users have come to expect already. Unless you intend to develop a custom application the likes of which have never been seen, users will already have a built-in expectation of how your application should behave, which options should be presented to them, where and how those options are displayed, which steps should occur next, how many steps it should take to complete a task, and so on. Market research — to identify and incorporate these expected conventions — is absolutely necessary before a single line of code is written.

Product readiness— end-to-end

In the end-to-end development process, products are taken from the definition stage all the way through the final release. This means that before any design takes place, a good development company will examine your idea, discuss and incorporate your business objectives, determine what the competition actually will be for your application, what those competitors are doing successfully, who the users of the product actually are, and what kind of expectations are already in place. This strategy gives a newly-developed application the best chance of being truly market-ready by the final deadline, and greatly increases the odds of a successful launch.

Though the comparison is likely beaten to death, Apple Maps serves as a warning to all those who would take a product to market before it’s actually ready. It took years for the application to recover its reputation after the initial, disastrous launch. It is safe to say that their preparation for the launch lacked adequate testing.

That’s why the developers at Applied Visions test applications while they are still in development. This means that, at each stage, our clients’ products are tested for errors and bugs in real-life conditions outside of a closed laboratory environment. This in-depth quality assurance helps maintain our track record of producing quality, high-performing, revenue-driven applications.