Web Application Development: Avoiding the Challenges

Custom web application development has changed dramatically over the past decade, and all signs point to further changes in the future. Businesses are placing a higher premium on cloud, desktop, mobile, and web applications, because that’s what users value. Ten years ago, when Facebook finally opened up registration to anyone with an email address, accessibility and user experience became both expected and valued, and the digital world has changed as a result. It also introduced a new range of problems to tackle.

Choosing the right company to develop your web app is a matter of finding one that understands the problems and knows how to avoid them altogether.

These problems can mainly be split into two categories: front end (user-based) and back end (technical).

Front end challenges for web application development companies

Web applications are not web pages. A company’s website usually involves a few static links, and exists mainly to provide information. Web applications, on the other hand, are interactive by nature, and users need to be able to access the various functions quickly, easily, and intuitively. If, for example, you have a shared calendar to schedule events, your users need to be able to quickly intuit how to access the schedule for a specific day, adjust it if necessary, then jump to a different week, all without tech support explaining it to them step-by-step.

Users are both the lifeblood of a successful application and the largest obstacle. Whatever a developer thinks, users don’t always do things the way developers want them to. In the calendar example, they may need to adjust the same day ten times, and having to go through the whole process from the beginning each time can be frustrating for them, so it can be a significant problem to prevent, but one that would never occur to some developers.

The solution requires serious UI/UX expertise. A company like Applied Visions understands the importance of UI/UX, and that it is absolutely critical to launch a successful web application. A UI/UX expert knows how an average user will likely use the product, and their input and design can mean the difference between a successful or tepid launch.

Back end challenges to web app development

A good web app is one that functions quickly and securely. Speed is always at a premium, of course— if it takes a full minute for a calendar page to load, that’s a problem. But it’s also a problem if the developer sacrifices security for speed. Web apps provide a unique vulnerability, because so many of them require the integration of third-party tools to function properly. That means that some web applications have vulnerabilities that aren’t necessarily within the developer’s control. It’s up to them to make sure that their web applications are as insulated from security risks as possible.

A good web application development company doesn’t compromise speed for security, and knows how to appropriately balance both. The solution to problems such as these relies heavily on extensive quality assurance and adherence to industry best practices, both of which change from year to year (and, in some cases, month to month). The right company will offer both extensive quality assurance before and after the launch of the product, as both security vulnerabilities and technical issues can arise unexpectedly in a dynamic, digital environment.

 

In short, if you want to avoid the challenges faced by web app development, you really need to have the right company in your corner. They can (and usually do) mean the difference between success and failure.