App Prototyping Using Proto.io: No Tech Skills Required

This is a guest post by Alexis Piperides, CEO of Proto.io. If you’re interested in writing a feature guest post for us, please get in touch with your ideas.

Formulating your project idea or concept in a concise and clear way to demonstrate it to stakeholders and people with the power to help bring the idea to life is not easy.

It requires certain skill sets and is usually done by highly experienced designers and/or developers. Nevertheless, there are countless entrepreneurs and businesses without these skills that still have great ideas for mobile apps.

The Entrepreneur’s Challenge

While entrepreneurs have great business ideas and the skills and knowledge to execute them, their lack of actual app development skills makes it hard for them to spec and visualize their idea for realization or fundraising purposes.

This leads them to the task of finding the right designer/development partner before they even start their new venture, which is both time consuming and risky, involving delays and bottlenecks.

So the question comes up… Can entrepreneurs can spec and prototype their app idea on their own and go to the market much faster than they would hiring a designer to do it for them?

Why Prototyping Isn’t Optional

Speccing and prototyping a mobile app before actually making it is a must.
Prototyping reduces the risk and cost associated with the mobile app’s development as it helps detect pitfalls, improves UX, and iterates for perfection.

Most importantly, prototypes bridge the communication gap between stakeholders, giving everyone the same accurate point of reference – especially since the development of a mobile app can be very complex, involving ideation, sketches, wireframes, mockups, prototypes, user trials, implementation, user testing, deployment and more. But, for the purposes of this article, we’ll just focus on specs, design and development