I am a first-time bubble/no-code platform user, and over the last four months, I’ve been more focused on learning the platform and figuring out how to build MVP features rather than the UX - e.g. responsiveness.
We’ve seen the choices as either 1) pause making additional progress on features (we’re about 30-40% complete) and go through the steps to make sure the app is responsive now, or 2) finish building to 100% feature MVP state and then make sure the app responsive at the end.
I would appreciate any thoughts/suggestions as well as pros/cons that we should be considering.
I agree with @aj11 and focus on finishing function first.
In order to take on responsiveness you may build new page/s with responsive in mind later on. Since you got function working … building for responsiveness may prove to be easier starting new/functional page/s from scratch.
When I first started building I thought I would build to get everything functional and then later focus on the look and the responsiveness and it was a total waste of time and a bad decision. I should have focused for a couple of hours to learn design techniques and how to build responsively. Having to come back later wasted a ton of time, and actually hindered by ability to create a great UX as part of the UX is the way the page is laid out and where certain elements may be placed.
In my opinion you should take a bit of time now to learn design and responsive design so that the remaining 60-70% of your app gets built with responsive design in place.
I have given the same recommendation to all of my students.
I agree with @boston85719 It is very easy to design a responsive page. It doesnt have to perfect. Start responsive and make it perfect later. That’s why it is rapid software development.
While there isn’t a singular perspective on the best path, it does seem like it doesn’t hurt to spend some time learning responsiveness now so we can at least get moving in the correct direction!
Can you recommend any course or YouTube video that teaches how to make my app responsive?
I know how to do it, but i always feel that there is a better way to do it or there is some strategies that I don’t know. I spend so many time making the app responsive, there are probably better and easier ways to do it
Let’s put it this way, in about 14 apps in my profile, 11M total views YTD, 82% of it came from mobile traffic.
I’d highly recommend building mobile however there are niches/industries you can get away with a desktop only launch for the app dashboard but the landing pages/signups must be mobile.
This is incredibly helpful! We definitely want to make sure that it is responsive for mobile devices. There are a lot of design decisions that come with that for our app, so it will definitely be a lift to make it accessible on a mobile device but we plan to do it.
Thankfully, there are two of us, so we split the difference. I made a copy of our app and have started learning about designing websites to be responsive (using the copy to experiment). My partner will keep moving forward on feature design. I’ve already asked him to make various changes to how he builds new things to make it easier when we make the official switch.
So far, the one thing I think will be most time-consuming is adjusting our features specifically for mobile devices. I already see that there will be significant decisions and changes across many of the features we are building to make a good UX on such a small screen (i.e., collapsed nav vs. full nav bar). I find it incredibly helpful to know more about responsiveness when considering the various features we are building in our app before we start building them.
I think my recommendation to others in the future would be to take my approach if there is more than one person. If only one person is designing the app, I’d probably suggest pausing building to spend a few days learning and messing around with responsiveness in a copy, then continuing to build features to account for what has been learned. We’ll see if I feel the same way once we do the complete redesign!
Thank you, everyone, for your thoughts and insight!
My personal preference and still learning from the great ones that share their information in YT tutorias, is to design each page and workflows already responsive from the start and try it out on different devices as it moves forward allowing to check both the user experience and debug if needed as you move on.
