Announcing Designware: A Bolder Vision For No-Code
After two years of hard work, my team and I are officially launching Designware, the first visual editor for both websites and apps. Heads up creative people: it’s going to be a game-changer.
Over the past years, my company transitioned from game studio to digital agency to platform developer. Each phase was a decent success in its own right, each project more ambitious than the last. In fact, we ended up building more than a hundred custom-coded games, websites, and apps for every major OS.
The common theme throughout our products was a love for tinkering with UI/UX; we explored how software lives and breathes to serve its living, breathing audience. And that driving passion got us thinking: why are we reinventing the wheel with every new project, constantly writing lines of code that duplicate what our designers have already mocked-up elsewhere? There’s usually a single best, most optimized way to write a line of code, and that means it can be automated — thereby speeding up all the creativity that goes on around it.
There is a very real business case for this, too. 63% of apps and 35% of websites are not successful. Development time and cost directly affect the top 6 reasons new ventures go under. In a digital-first world, this is a massive problem to solve.
I’m a non-technical founder with a background in design. I envision products and guide their features; I fundraise to finance them, promote the heck out of them, and talk to users almost every day. I’m not a half-bad frontend coder, but I definitely can’t build an entire digital product on my own — the architecture, functionality, and deployment are outside my skill set.
Between ideation and commercialization, the person driving a product’s vision usually loses control of the build process.
And therein is the predicament I’ve seen countless times across hundreds of teams: the person driving a product’s vision is usually responsible for its success, but between ideation and commercialization, they lose control of the build process. The product almost always needs to be developed by someone else, someone who is unlikely to be personally invested or exposed on the frontlines of the free market economy.
Developers are invaluable resources, and there are tons of great tools to generate design mockups and manage dev handoffs. But that pipeline is always fraught with miscommunication, error, scope reduction, and bugs — not to mention usually running over time and budget.
The result is that the final product does not match the initial vision, making it all the more difficult to commercialize. My own team has gotten tired of this dynamic; our devs have bigger fish to fry than checking font weights and line spacings, while our creatives and marketers still need to stress those fine points as a matter of audience perception and economics.
So, we started thinking about a different approach:
- What if app and website development went from being a technical endeavour to a wholly creative process? And I mean real apps and websites, the kind that land in an app store’s Top 10 or serve as the backbone of a Fortune 500 company.
- What if the person with the initial vision could own the build from start to finish, designing and wiring everything by themselves, without code? What would that kind of autonomy and control feel like to an entrepreneur or project manager?
- What if every project was bug-free and could be published in a few clicks to any OS or device or app store, regardless of what it does or how it was put together?
What if decades of barriers to entry in software development came down like the Berlin Wall?
And now you’re thinking, “cool, but I’ve seen no-code platforms, and they can’t do that.” You’d be correct. If we survey the landscape, we see brand name editors going whole-hog on templated websites and online stores — and these are excellent solutions I’d recommend for personal projects or small businesses.
Curious designers and agencies will drift to one of the emerging advanced website editors — but those require a working knowledge of frontend development. And app-editors do exist but have yet to enable the level of customization and sophistication that custom code offers to tap into the mainstream.
Two years ago, my team decided to tackle the no-code gap.
We knew we needed to address the 100 million new apps, websites, and digital signage deployments per year that are custom coded or running on legacy systems. So, I raised $3M and we staffed up, building some very deep technology that required a programmatic tour de force.
The truly challenging aspect was coming up with the novel methodologies and workflows that would make our platform easy to understand and quick to use while scaling to support anyone’s abstract use case. The same set of tools would need to be able to build a website, or an app, or anything really.
We wanted to build software that could build all other software…
And that meant taking no shortcuts and making no assumptions. After a lot of thought, we landed on these core rules to drive the platform’s design and development:
- Be Open-Ended: Nothing should lock the user into a particular style or use case. Our mission is to enable creatives to build projects without limitations, so our tools must evolve to support anything that hand-written code can do.
- Be Accessible: It should be easy to use, despite the vastness of what it can be used to create. It should cater to both high-level dreamers and detail-oriented pixel whippers.
- Be Universal: Projects should be publishable to any app or web format and runnable on any device.
Throughout development, there was a lot of trial and error as we built new technologies, broke barriers, and changed ways of doing things. We also went through lots of fun branding exercises and decided to call our special baby “Designware,” a nod to its identity as a creative tool built by and for creative people.
Over the last few months, we’ve put Designware in the hands of beta users across three continents.
They’re designers, marketers, entrepreneurs, agency managers… and here’s what they liked the most about Designware:
- Universal Publishing. Designware is the first and only platform that can publish a project as a website or PWA and also export as native apps for iOS, Android, Windows, and macOS. This includes domain integration, hosting, SSL management, app signing & certification, app compiling with auto-versioning, compatibility with the app stores, and real-time cloud updates when you’re ready to post new content.
- Automatically Responsive. Projects can be edited in any shape or size, are naturally responsive with built-in flex properties, and users can manage breakpoints and assign specific edits to breakpoints. The outcome, as crazy as it sounds, is that a mobile interface will run on an 8K billboard and vice versa. Yes, we’ve tried.
- Full Customization. The blocks that make up page content are powerful visual elements in their own right. Users can customize blocks to the Nth degree and even save them as different types of templates (like components). We also provide shortcuts by offering pre-generated templates. Nothing is hard-wired to a specific use case, so common blocks can be abstracted to make anything — a corporate website, an online file repository, a travel app, a digital signage playlist… you get the idea.
- 100% Green. Data servers around the world generate as much CO2 as the entire aviation industry, and it’s time to stop (your digital product won’t have any customers if they’re all dead). Our data hosting runs on renewable energy, and not just carbon offsets. As far as we know, we’re the first design system to guarantee our users’ creations have a reduced carbon footprint.
- And More. Check out our full list of up-to-date features.
Today, our labour of love is one of the most powerful and flexible interface editors, which goes the extra mile for creative users. And, it publishes to 99% of global devices and operating systems in use.
Our next big move is to close the gap toward allowing users to assemble true digital products with real utility, thus fulfilling Designware’s core mission: to be software that can build all other software. That means loading it up with all sorts of forms and end-user inputs, dynamic logic, databases, and integrations. Our singular vision is to allow you to build the next Netflix or Airbnb, or SAP, all from the same toolbox. You’ll see us hurtling toward this goal with updates being released every few weeks.
That’s my vision for Designware, and I hope it can help power your vision. If you’re curious, give it a spin, and let us know what you think. You can reach out to me directly with questions and suggestions, at andrew[@]designware.io.
