The last few years have marked a significant increase in the number of companies that utilize low-code for application development (AppDev). By 2025, 70 percent of new applications developed by organizations will use low-code or no-code technologies, up from less than 25 percent in 2020, according to Gartner. What’s more, a recent survey found that more than half (56 percent) of respondents expect their use of low-code tools to increase in 2024.
This major shift underscores the growing recognition of low-code platforms as critical tools for accelerating digital transformation strategies, enhancing productivity and fostering innovation across industries. The App Builder 2024 Reveal survey found that low-code tools boosted developer productivity at 90 percent of organizations. Now, low-code has even started influencing the way teams validate new ideas and innovations before committing to full-scale development – starting from proofs of concepts (PoCs) and extending to minimum viable products (MVPs) and full-fledged applications.
In industries such as healthcare and finance where innovation is key, low-code tools allow for rapid experimentation with new product ideas and features. A FinTech company, for example, may use a low-code platform to quickly develop a PoC for a new mobile banking app, testing its features and UX before jumping straight to full-scale development. So, it’s no surprise that this transformation streamlines the entire lifecycle of AppDev, making it more efficient and collaborative.
Understanding the role of low-code in PoCs
Undoubtedly, businesses are under constant pressure to build new solutions faster and ahead of the competition. One of the most critical aspects of this innovation process is the creation of early models and PoCs that demonstrate the viability of a pilot project and the potential of new ideas. Usually, this involves different teams and people with different roles:
- Project managers: Supervise the project, ensuring it stays on track and meets objectives.
- Business analysts: Gather requirements and translate business needs to technical specifications.
- Developers: Write the code to build the prototype, usually requiring extensive programming skills.
- Designers: Create the visual elements of the PoC, ensuring it is user-friendly and responds well to user interaction.
- Quality assurance testers: Test the PoCs for bugs and ensure they meet all criteria and standards.
- Stakeholders: Provide feedback and make sure the PoC aligns with business goals.
While traditional software development often falls short in meeting the demand for speed and agility when creating PoCs, low-code development platforms, have the capabilities to accelerate the process from ideation to deployment.
How to accelerate PoCs with low-code
In essence, low-code development platforms are designed to simplify and speed up app development processes by eliminating handoffs, minimizing the need for extensive coding, and providing assets like a complete UI toolbox with ready-to-use components, code generation for modern web frameworks, code preview, data binding, analytics capabilities, AI, theming, branding, templates, customization options, and more. When it comes to PoCs, here’s how these tools accelerate the process.
Connecting to real data
Easily connecting to your real, live data as you build your app is crucial, especially when creating prototypes and proof of concepts to gather feedback from stakeholders and customers. When using real data, early models look significantly different from those with dummy data as this will simulate an authentic experience, not just the interactions, which often leads to confusion and miscommunication when taken to the next phase in the app development cycle.
With low-code tools, users can take advantage of an environment for visually defining the UIs, workflows, and data models. They can also automatically handle data structures, data binding, property setting, and more. More advanced tools also provide embedded analytics dashboards which can be implemented and demonstrated early on, thus, improving the entire app experience from the very first stage.
Going from design to code
This powerful feature allows people to take a completed design file, say in Sketch or Figma, and convert it to pixel-perfect code in a single click. In most cases, all they must do is use the drag and drop interface of the low-code tool and add the design to the canvas where they can start customizing it if necessary. As a result, it eliminates the traditional handoff process between designers and developers and reduces the risk of miscommunication, enhances collaboration and more.
Empowering a broader range of users
Low-code is what democratizes the development process, allowing citizen developers and less experienced programmers to directly contribute to the creation of PoCs. With pre-built templates and components, they can easily and quickly create high-fidelity prototypes and build basic behaviors without having to manually code everything from scratch.
Enabling rapid iteration and testing
Once stakeholders provide their feedback, designers and developers can easily adjust workflows, expand features and make changes to the PoC while still ensuring it remains scalable and relevant. This iterative process helps refine the early-stage model of the app by addressing issues and improving its functionalities at a faster rate. Another key feature with low-code tools is that PoCs can also be used for selecting a framework. For example, you can create a solution and, based on the code, determine which framework would make it easier to achieve the next steps in development.
Benefiting from AI capabilities
Another key benefit is the increasing integration with developing technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), which can also transform the way PoCs are developed. For example, low-code AI can automate repetitive tasks which are typically time-consuming, or it can save resources and provide intelligent assistance by generating items, such as producing visuals based on a description and data sources or handling component design and complete view or app creation.
In essence, low-code platforms are becoming essential for accelerating every single phase in software development, including PoCs. These tools can streamline the development process, democratize code, accelerate time to market and empower a broader range of users. By enabling rapid iterations, real-time data integration, seamless design-to-code transitions and AI capabilities, low-code tools even reshape how businesses validate and implement new ideas. When one has such a strategic shift in place, it will enhance speed, agility and collaboration, giving companies a competitive edge and driving digital transformation.
[inlinead-1]