WWW… Wednesday! Adalo

by Taylor Slattery | July 13, 2021

As product designers, the hardest part of the job often comes right after the hand-off, when you have to wait for the development team to deliver the final, working product. This process is hardly without its hurdles and often, sacrifices and compromises have to be made along the way in order to stay on budget or ship on time.

The past few years have brought us many tools that allow designers to create high-fidelity prototypes complete with animations that serve as more accurate roadmaps for the developers. This has cut down on the back and forths between design and development teams and sped the development cycle up substantially, but this dependency on developers is still an obstacle to our self-sufficiency as designers. For teams with limited resources, this dependency is not just an obstacle, but a barrier to entry.

Adalo is a no-code tool for app creation that allows designers and teams of any size to bypass the long development cycle and get to a working product quickly. Adalo enables designers to create real, functioning apps, not just high-fidelity mockups with animations. Once your work is complete, you can publish it directly to the App Store, Google Play, or to a custom domain.

Adalo is extremely user-friendly. In a similar vein as most other no-code tools, Adalo takes processes most users will already be familiar with and adapts them to the process of developing a functioning app. In this case, the creation process is likened to creating a slide deck, with each screen being linked together via interactions and animations, and the group as a whole unified via a connected database.

Users with experience in Figma, Sketch, or Adobe XD will feel right at home and be able to start churning out beautiful apps in no time. Even with the tools available to designers today that make the app creation process much more accessible, the need for a development team or some coding knowledge keeps designers from reaching the final product quickly. Getting a design just right requires testing and making adjustments to result in a product that is both reflective of the original creative vision and capable of responding to the demands that real-world use will place upon it.

Normally, this would result in lots of back and forths with developers and long, dragged-out production cycles. With Adalo, the process couldn’t be any simpler. Drag and drop components allow you to build an app from scratch in minutes. Once you’re up and running, you can publish native apps to both iOS and Android and get some much-needed feedback. When it’s time to make revisions, you can easily iterate on previous versions or start from scratch all over again. You have the creative freedom to make your product as simple or complex as you need it to be.

Adalo is free to try. You can learn more and try it out here.

Taylor is the Managing Editor of Notes on Design. Taylor is a graphic designer, illustrator, and Design Lead at Weirdsleep.

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