4 Tips To Speed Up Building Your App

Written by: Ting Chou, Software Engineer at Thunkable

Building an app can be a complex process but thanks to Thunkable, complexity doesn’t mean it has to take a long time. Rather, it just means you have to think things through before jumping right in. Here are 4 key tips for speeding up your app-building effort.

Define The Minimum Requirements

It is the first step that is most troublesome. To make it easier for yourself to get started, the key is knowing specifically what you want to build. And the best way to do that is to define the essential requirements. Some of you may have a clear vision of the end product, which usually includes many complex features, and thus it is all difficult before breaking it down to the minimum requirements.

Remember, great oaks grow from little acorns.

• Instagram started as a photo-sharing app without many popular features nowadays such as Instagram live, stories, and messaging.
• The first version of Yelp was records of email responses from users asking their friends for recommendations on specific locations or types of places.

They all realized their grand idea in the basic form at the beginning, and gradually added enhancements over time.

So what do minimum requirements look like?

There are some great examples from our Thunkable users:

Example 1: A nutrition app with an OCR scanner — an app uses an OCR scanner to read the image and let the user know if it is healthy or not (How to create nutrition app with ocr scanner?)

The minimum requirements could be:

1. A user can take pictures via mobile camera in the app
2. The app can tell what food it is from the picture taken (image recognition)
3. The app can match the food with its nutrition facts
4. The app can display the nutrition facts to the user

Note: If using barcode instead (as some of our users suggested), 2 and 3 can be combined as “the app can process the barcode and output the corresponding nutrition facts”.

Example 2: A stray animal census app — an app sharing photos and location of stray animals from users for the proper authorities to pick it up (I need help making a census app and pet tracker). The minimum requirements could be:

1. A user can take pictures via mobile camera in the app
2. A user can enter the location and other details in the app
3. A user can send the report to a default animal care center via SMS in the app

There are also many recommended enhancements that have been suggested in the discussion thread, such as:

• Find care centers nearby for users to choose
• Classify species from the images
• Detect location when users are taking pictures
• …and more

These features are definitely going to make the app better, but you could leave it out as they are not the core functionality (for now). You can always come back to add them to the app after the core functionality is completed. Remember — this is about defining minimum requirements and planting the seed. The tree and feature will grow from there.

Focus on the minimum requirements not only shorten the delivery time but also consolidate the central concept. The Uber app may look much different from the very first version, the basic idea hasn’t changed: push a button and get a ride.

Choose Your Tools and Materials

After defining the minimum requirements, it becomes clear what you need to build your app and that makes it easier to choose the most suitable tools and materials. If you know you’re going to make beef stew for dinner, then when grocery shopping, you would not care so much about seafood or be distracted by chicken.

On Thunkable, these “tools” or “materials” are called “components”. For example, when making a basic photo-sharing app, here are your components:

1. A user can take pictures via mobile camera in the app

When setting your minimum requirements, camera functionality is a core need. The Camera component should be included in your initial build plans. .

2. The app stores pictures

As this is related to storage, the Data Storage section should quickly stand out. With our goal “storing pictures” in mind, Media DB (Database) looks the most promising among all the options since your users will want to capture and store their photos.

3. The app displays pictures

While using the Image component repeatedly to show a series of pictures is the most intuitive way, the Data Viewers section is another core requirement so your users can actually view their photos.

As you notice, it makes a difference when you have something specific in mind. If you don’t know what you want, looking through the long documentation could be overwhelming. It would be intimidating to study the whole dictionary, but it’s simple to look up some words in a dictionary. Once you get more familiar with the platform and each component, you will be able to come up with ways to turn ideas into apps faster even without checking documentation as you know your tools/materials well.

Quickly Tryout The Components

Now that we have our cuisine in mind and all the ingredients are prepared, shall we cook? Yes and no. Yes, we should start developing each requirement toward the end product. No, we are not going to make it look like an end product right away. Instead of starting from your desired style and feel, it is usually more efficient to quickly try out each component and get to know if it fits your needs. If everything goes well, that’s perfect; if not, we get chances to adjust accordingly with low time investment since we haven’t put much time and effort into the entire app experience yet.

Continuing with the basic photo-sharing app example, following the video tutorial to try out the camera component is a great way to get familiar with it. The tutorial is also available on the Thunkable platform with demo app and step by step instructions:

If you are already familiar with the Thunkable platform (you know where to find components, what blocks are, how to live test…etc), checking the Thunkable documentation should be sufficient.

A quick tryout/test is also important when you start building your app. The key is to make small changes and test if it works as expected as you go. If you make several changes at once, it would become difficult to tell what and where things went wrong. Thunkable live test is the best thing for testing quickly — as you make changes to your apps on Thunkable, you can see it being reflected on your mobile phone or directly on the web in your browser right away. It is the best way to test, iterate, and build quickly.

The goal of trying out and testing / each component is to confirm the feasibility of your approach. Quickly trying it out gives the opportunities to understand the limitations while exploring more possibilities. If at the beginning of our plan, we wanted to let users choose a photo in their phone instead of taking a picture via camera, we may decide to use the Photo Library component. Later in our testing session, we find the Photo Library component is not supported on the web and decide to add the Camera component to our app to cover web users. It’s as if, before starting your car, you take a look under the hood to check that everything is fine.

Beautify Immediately

Once you have your components locked in, it’s time to get to work on the complete product. A quick prototype may look a little bit rough but will have answered key questions for you while building your expertise with these components. As you gain confidence, you’ll also clearly define what to (and what not to) include in your product. The prototype will be functional, but not beautiful. To fix that, there is one component that would beautify your app immediately: the Animation component. Take a look at the animations from the Lottie community and picture one of them on your app. There is no reason not to spend 5 minutes (you’d probably spend 4 minutes on selecting animation and only 1 minute to set up) to make your app appealing for your users. An animation within your app’s experience will dramatically improve the quality of the user interface.

Animation is also great for polishing your final app. Whether you want click effects to make users feel they perform actions, progress animations to keep users entertained while waiting, or guidance to show users the most important part — it improves the usability and experience. In addition to that, it also makes your app more memorable. This is not saying we should spread animations all over the app but a well-used animation will create a memorable and enjoyable experience. Excessive use of animations could be as bad as their deficiency. Ensure to add animations only when they are going to improve your app’s experience.

I hope these tips will help accelerate your app-building experience. It is good to get something done first and build your familiarity first. You can always come back later to make it better, faster!