IoT in Real Estate

The Internet of Things has already changed how we work, live, and play! It is being used across all industries; real estate, healthcare, manufacturing, education, and more. According to Statista, by 2025 there will be over 75 billion connected devices, and according to McKinsey, by the same year, IoT could have an annual, global impact of $3.9 trillion.

This is a large impact on society’s economy, and over the next few decades, we will start to see these changes in action. As an IoT mobile app company chicago based, we have to stay on top of trends and statistics within the world of IoT in order to provide our clients with the best business solution possible.

Ultimately, leveraging IoT apps in commercial real estate, when done the right way, can lead to cost savings through better operations. As an app development agency that specializes in IoT, outlined below are the ways that IoT is impacting the real estate industry.

Its very likely that emerging technologies will reshape the face of the real estate industry. One innovative device is already being adopted by more forward-thinking agencies: the beacon. The beacon is a sleek, small device that uses low energy Bluetooth signals to send or receive information to or from a mobile phone.

Beacons can help realtors turn their showings into an immersive, interactive experience for renters and buyers. If a beacon is placed near the front door of a home, it can connect with clients when they enter the building who have downloaded the real estate agency’s app. From there, the beacon can offer essential property information and get the clients information. This idea makes it easy for the real estate agent to provide a more engaging open house experience as well as track prospective buyers.

App developers in chicago have seen a major boom in the need for mobile apps where IoT is changing real estate with HVAC systems and smart devices. HVAC systems and smart devices now can respond to the presence/absence of occupants and can adjust air conditioning, heat, and light. When someone lives in the home for a long period of time, the system starts to pick up on usage patterns and find the best way to cut down on energy costs and maximize performance.

For example, having a smart home device such as a wifi enabled water heater gives homeowners the control to choose how long and when the water heater runs during the day. This device provides hot water when it’s needed the most by optimizing water temperatures.

As a home ages, of course maintenance and issues are unavoidable. But, what if homeowners could see these problems and fix them ahead of time? IoT predictive analytics enable homeowners to identify issues and address system failures even before they happen. Through this idea of predictive maintenance, there are sensors and real time energy monitoring that can keep track of any irregularities and have the power to alert you when it’s time for maintenance, when an issue is about to occur, and can predict a maintenance schedule by knowing how much energy has been consumed.

The real estate industry as a whole should plan to incorporate these IoT technologies because they will help drive the way businesses will operate in the near future.

If you’re looking for a well-rounded group of chicago app developers and a ux company or simply want more information on our mobile app design agency? Visit Codal’s blog, or come talk to us here! We’d love to hear from you.

A Strong UX Design Toolbox

Web and app developers in Chicago and all over the world will tell you how important it is to have strong, functional UX design tools on hand at all times.

As an agency that specializes in UX design services, having our designers invest in these tools will help your company and team hit the ground running. Here are some of the must-have tools for a strong UX design toolbox.

1. Pen and Paper
This may seem silly and trivial but a pen and paper is a good resource and friend when it comes to being an XD. A pen and paper helps you sketch out ideas without getting too attached or spending too much time on something you don’t like very much. This is about getting your ideas on paper quickly, not perfectly; you don’t need to be an amazing artist to enjoy using this tool. Since a pen and paper is so mobile, you can sketch out an idea wherever you may be. I can bet that many XD’s use this tool at their UX design company!

2. A UX Checklist
When you’re first starting out as a designer, a UX checklist is a great tool to have. A UX checklist helps you remember areas that are frequently looked over or forgotten, such as accessibility and error messages. As a UX design Chicago based company, senior designers here at Codal have said designing from scratch can be a difficult task if you’re new and unsure of the amount of areas you need to cover.

3. Sketch
Many UX designers can easily say that Sketch literally revolutionized UI design. This new wave of design inspired intuitive UI design tools like exporting, symbols, and artboards; it’s a great tool to put designs together quickly. Sketch is one of the most intuitive and efficient design tools, if not the best. Another bonus using Sketch as a tool is that it plays well with inVision for prototyping. Which brings us to our next great tool, you guessed it, inVision.

4. inVision App
This suite offers a complete solution to today’s market: screen design, design handoff, prototyping, and advanced animations. inVision allows Sketch designers to import screens and turn them into prototypes. Stakeholders can offer their feedback to the UI design services and that feedback can be converted into actionable and manageable tasks.

5. Axure
Axure is used specifically for the design of rough prototypes and wireframes. Axure is a great tool for designers to focus solely on prototyping and wireframes. It comes with features that make creating dynamic, data-driven, and adaptive mockups so simple.

6. Abstract
The last tool I’d like to recommend is Abstract. This tool is essentially GitHub (Stores source code, version control, documentation) for designers. Abstract is used to manage Sketch files, including design systems. It’s a great tool for large teams so everyone can review each other’s work.

Conclusion
If you’re a beginner just getting into UX design, or a seasoned vet who’s forgot what the basic tools are, these are some good examples of what should always be in your UX design toolbox!

Looking to work with a ux company or a Chicago-based mobile app development company? Are you wanting to develop an app or website or simply want more information on our web design agency? Visit Codal’s blog, or come talk to us here! We’d love to hear from you.

Improving Your Mobile Checkout Process

In upcoming days and months, it is time to start thinking about the holiday rush of shoppers. Although halloween hasn’t even hit, and it is only a few days into September, it’s time to start optimizing your website for the holiday season.

Optimizing and improving your mobile checkout process is a great way to start. It is said that 54% of emails are opened on a mobile device. This means that if you’re sending email campaigns for your eCommerce business, not only the email, but your website, and even checkout process has to work perfectly on mobile.

Reduce the Number of Fields

Your form should include the bare essentials of questions and fields to fill out. While a question like “Where did you hear about us?” might help the vendor tremendously, you could lose customers if the form appears to be too long to fill out. UX and UI research will show that shorter forms will equal more conversions, especially when talking about mobile!

During the holiday season, users are making very frequent purchases, on many different websites. Customers should be given the option to checkout as a guest for this very reason. How many accounts are they going to make in such a short amount of time?

Put simply, a user is much less likely to go through the process of purchase if they have to create an account. Most mobile app design companies will also make this suggestion to their clients.

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Show Progress of Checkout

Users will be much happier knowing how many steps they have to take to complete a purchase. A simple visual design to show how many steps are left, keep the user informed. Any individual or company that offers UI design services can help craft a beautiful design that not only is visually appealing, but will be very informative for your customer.

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Take Advantage of Third Party Services

PayPal, Amazon, Apple + Google Wallet should be your best friends. Why would you force your users to pull out their physical wallets, and type in their credit card number when they don’t have to?

When a customer utilizes one of these services, their information is typically auto-populated, making the checkout process as easy as it possibly can be. Not only is it easy, but these platforms are extremely trusted by customers.

While these types of integrations may seem like they could be difficult, it would be a piece of cake for any mobile app design and development company.

Millennials Are Addicted To Technology

The notion that millennials are addicted to technology is absolutely valid and is also backed by research. According to Zogby Analytics, 87% of millennials say their phones never leave their side.

The desire and need to be connect constantly is a trend that is not going away anytime soon. More importantly, a mobile application development agency needs to constantly stay up to date with latest technologies, since it is what these millennials are wanting and expecting.

Importance of knowing this addiction

Since the millennial group is the largest, making sure you are catering technology that fits their demands is crucial for the success of a business. Especially with the growth of ecommerce and social media, this group is looking to technology to be their source of entertainment, information and social connection.

If you are not actively present and reaching millennials through their addictive technology behavior, it is a huge opportunity loss.

Although making sure you have a website or mobile application is just the start. Not only do millennials expect this functionality, but they are selective in using the technology that is of superior usability. As a result, hiring a UX design agency is one of the only options to ensure your technology is up to the users expectation.

Why millennials are important

Economically, millennials will have the most spending power of any generation. In year 2020, they are also expected to account for 30% of retail sales in the United States, which equates to $1.4 trillion in spending.

In relation to technology, millennials are 2.5x more likely to be an earlier adopter of technology. They are also connected multiple devices, as high as 7 devices on average!

Millennials also range in age, which translates into affecting their purchasing behavior. For instance, the older millennials are likely to be married and have children, whereas the younger millennials are still of college age.

Regardless, capturing and catering to this group of individuals is key for a successful business in 2017.

What to do with this addiction trend?

Like in most trends, those that succeed are the ones that embrace the trends of today. Since majority of millennials are glued to their phones, making sure your company has a superior digital presence is critical.

Due to the fact that the technology space is very crowded and competitive, to rise above the rest requires more than just internal effort. In many cases, having a technology partner on your team like a user experience design service is the most effective way to reach the millennial group.

Conclusion

No matter what industry you are in, whether it is retail, healthcare, government, or education, the technology component is becoming more and more important. The ability to stay ahead of this technology curve and trends can mean the difference between success and failure of your business.

Looking for more insight on UX design services? Are you wanting to develop an app and you need to know the cost to develop an app is? Visit Codal’s blog, or come talk to us on go@codal.com! We’d love to hear from you.

An Introduction to Cake PHP

What is CakePHP?

CakePHP is an open source web framework for the traditional web language, PHP. Cake PHP framework follows the model-view-controller (MVC) approach. MVC is an architectural pattern for developing and implementing the user interface on the web. The CakePHP framework is of course written in the PHP language. In fact, PHP follows many of the concepts from the framework Ruby on Rails.

Here at Codal, a UX design and development agency, we use CakePHP in many of our projects.

Overall, CakePHP is simplifies the process of devloping a web application; it requires much less code, and will take a lot less time.

CakePHP makes building web applications simpler, faster, while requiring less code. Their motto is “Build fast, grow solid with CakePHP” and this couldn’t be anymore accurate.

Why Use CakePHP?

As a web and mobile app development agency in Chicago, we’re always using new frameworks, and testing the latest code. You may be wondering why you, or we would choose to use CakePHP on a project. Well, here’s why:

Developer Efficiency: CakePHP allows us, as a group of developers in Chicago, to code as fast and efficient as possible. It requires any developer to write a bit less code, with still achieving the same goal in the end.

Open Source Community: CakePHP is an open source framework of PHP. The open source community of CakePHP is extremely active and friendly.

Flexibility: Flexibility all around. The liscensing is flexible, flexible caching, and flexible (and fast) templating and lastly, flexible ACL/permissions.

Releases: As a software development agency, a consistent release cycle is obviously important, and that is something that CakePHP does well on.

Interested in PHP developers in Chicago and want to start a project? Are you wanting to develop an app and you need to know the cost to develop an app is? Visit Codal’s blog, or come talk to us here! We’d love to hear from you.

UX Research and Testing Is Critical For Virtual Reality

The technology of virtual reality is really starting to explode in the tech industry. Systems that can be categorized under virtual reality can range from expensive high-end platforms to smartphone-run systems.

UX and Virtual Reality

Beau Cronin explains a hierarchical pyramid when looking at the needs of virtual reality in relation to user experience.

As you can see on the pyramid the foundational components that a UX design company needs to keep in mind are the comfort and interpretability of the virtual reality system. It is once designers master those that they can start to tackle the issues of usefulness and the delight of a design. Ultimately, in order to really provide a good user experience a user experience design services needs to master the entire pyramid.

Components of Virtual Reality

Comfort

Virtual reality takes UX to a whole new level with having to focus on the comfort of the user. For example, a mobile app development agency does not need to focus on the comfort of the user, since the overall experience of a flat interface app doesn’t necessarily affect an overall level of comfort.
Virtual reality on the other hand, can greatly influence the overall comfort of the user. Some examples of discomforts users can experience are nausea and headaches. That is the last experience a user wants to willingly undergo, so it is critical to test and fix a system that may may generate those experiences.

Interface

Like the need to focus on comfort, the interface is also drastically different that what UX companies are used to handing. This is also a bigger change than the shift from desktop to mobile because of the high level of differences virtual reality offers. For example, since the resolution on VR headsets is comparably lower than a PC monitor, text and buttons need to be larger and more distinguishable.

Movement

Since VR systems are highly based on the movement of the user, a great emphasis on testing those different movements is extremely critical in order to achieve optimal user experience. Additionally, keeping in mind the different environments a user may potentially be in is diverse and important.

Conclusion

Since virtual reality is such a new and emerging technology, UX design agencies need to be very careful and thorough in the research and user testing phases. It is those virtual reality systems that incorporate UX in the design and development that will arise to be the leaders of the virtual technology industry.

Looking for more insight on UX design services for a virtual reality experience? Are you wanting to develop an app and you need to know the cost to develop an app is? Visit Codal’s blog, or come talk to us on go@codal.com! We’d love to hear from you.

Design Sprint: The Goods and Bads

A design sprint is a time-constrained, five-day series of interactive exercises. This process is one that includes the entire mobile app design company team to establish and hit the defined goals and objectives. Specifically this type of process is for a MVP (Minimum Value Product) type of project.

The phases that are included in this five day series, each taking a day to complete, is understanding the scope, diverging ways to solve the problem, deciding on the best alternative, prototyping, and validating to decide what is working and what is not.

A design sprint is one that can produce a lot of positive insight but deciding on the right project to implement this type of project is extremely important. User experience design services need to be aware of the pros and cons of a design sprint in order to utilize it most effectively.

Benefits of a Design Sprint

Collaboration

The ability to have a process which incorporates individuals from each area of the mobile app development agency can result in powerful insight. Incorporating a group think approach to this design process creates a better opportunity to brainstorm and resolve problems in an innovative way.

Quick process

The nature of a design sprint and the purpose of making it a five-day phase encourages quick thoughts and actions. This emphasis on a faster pace can help generate momentum in a team to create and test ideas with a rapid turnaround on feedback. This is especially beneficial in large organizations which accomplishing of projects can take significant time.

Emphasis on main issues

As a result of a fast pace process, the team only has time to focus on the main issues. Knowing the scope of the main issues and the ability to resolve the issues will provide better insight on whether the particular project is worth continuing. Additionally, after the five days you have a broader sense of where to continue with the project.

Drawbacks of a Design Sprint

Obtaining refined user research

The outcome of a design sprint is not to produced the most sophisticated results. UX and UI research is only hit on a very surface level approach. Further research such as in ethnography, would need to be included to achieve deeper insight.

Having definite answers

The purpose of the outcome of a design sprint is to figure out where to go to next. If the desired outcome is to have a definitive answer on the next steps, a design sprint is not the route to take. The only definitive answer that can arise out of a design sprint is choosing not to do a particular project.

Conclusion

Implementing a design sprint process in a ux design company can have some valuable results. Although it is important to keep in mind that the purpose of the sprint is to achieve quick and collaborative insights that will ultimately need to be expanded and developed upon in the next steps.

Looking for more insight on UX design services? Are you wanting to develop an app and you need to know the cost to develop an app is? Visit Codal’s blog, or come talk to us here! We’d love to hear from you.

Designing a Website to Attract a Younger Audience

The generation of millennials and gen Z are ones that either grew up in the technology boom or do not know life without technology being so intimate in everyone’s lives. Since technology is so integrated within these generation’s lives, creating useful and usable website for them is more critical than ever.

As a user experience design services, it is important to know the aspects and functions of a website that will reach and engage the younger audience best. Below are a list of things that every web development agency should keep in mind when designing a website with a target that fit into these demographics.

Mobile Friendly Website

Considering most of the individuals that fall into these categories are glued to their phone or a mobile device of some sort, it is critical to make sure your website is optimized when accessed through a mobile device.

It is also important to keep in mind that this generation is expecting information fast, thus designing to fit the needs to user is very important. A simple way you can do it is making the ease of use when browsing your website quick and to the point.

Content that Sparks Interest

Simply providing standard text as content is not enough for these users. This can range from using a more loose language and read’s as it is spoken to providing an engaging video, it will track more interest from these younger users.

Ultimately a ux design company should design and develop your site that is fun and personal. Regardless of the site or industry, if you are targeting a younger demographic you are going to want to incorporate a flare of entertainment.

Keep it Simple

Simplicity is key when targeting a generation that is busier than ever. This particular target is not going to hurdle their way to find the information or product they want, instead they will just leave to another site that gives it to them directly. It is key to deliver content and design the website in a digestible way that can be quick to understand.

Connect with Social

Although this may seem like an obvious point it is one that cannot be missed. Once you have designed a website to clearly represent the brand and the purpose, it is important to share and create a voice for the site on a social platform. This social voice needs to be reflective of the brand’s identity.

Conclusion

As a web development agency, one of the first steps in designing and developing a site is being aware of who your target audience. If your target audience includes millennials or gen z, following these tips will help increase user experience and engagement to your site.

Looking for more insight on UX design services? Are you wanting to develop an app and you need to know how much does it cost to develop an app? Visit Codal’s blog, or come talk to us here! We’d love to hear from you.

How Long Does it Take to Develop an App?

The duration of time that it takes a mobile app development company to create and develop an app varies depending on the type of app. An MVP (minimum viable product) can take about five months to fully complete. Although if you want to develop an app with many features and capabilities, it could take as long as a year, to a year and a half to develop.

The process of developing an app includes four distinct stages. The type of mobile app development and design is what determines the length of time each of these parts will take.

Discovery and Planning

The discovery and planning stage is one that is pretty standard across all types of apps. Some of the steps included in this stage is project introduction, goal definition, design plan creation and sprint planning.

Roughly, this stage would last approximately one to two weeks. An application development firm should have this stage’s components set up in a structured that can be quickly implemented.

Research and Strategy

Unlike the first stage, the research and strategy phase time duration is significantly varied. The components included in this stage is user surveys and interviews, journey and empathy mapping, rapid prototyping, user testing and define design guidelines.

The reason the time frame is so varied is all these components can either be briefly or thoroughly completed. For example, a ux design company may find it necessary to pool a larger sample size of users to test, resulting in it taking longer to complete the stage.

An average range that this stage would take is four weeks to two months.

Conceptual Design

The conceptual design phase is one where the user experience design services utilize their research into the direct development of the app. The four parts of this phase is sitemap creation, low fidelity prototyping, user testing and design documentation creation.

The major aspect of this third stage that vary from app to app is the low fidelity prototyping. This stage is all dependent on the type of app and the features wanted in the app, which greatly fluctuates the time frame. The length of time for this stage can range from one month to five months.

Detailed Design

The final stage of developing an app is the detailed design stage. The three sections of this stage is high fidelity interactive prototyping, user testing and user interface design.

This stage is probably the most fluctuating stage in terms of time frame due to the fact that these three parts are highly dependent on the number of features of the app. For example, if there is only five features on the app, the time to prototype, test, and develop a user interface design is relatively short in comparison to a fifty feature app.

On average, for an app that is considered an MVP, the time dedicated to this stage can take about a month, whereas an advanced app can take up to six months to complete.

ConclusionHow long does it take to develop an app? Well, it really depends on the type of app. In general an app with minimal features can take a experienced mobile apps development chicago company four months to complete. On the other end, an app that requires an in depth and heavy workload in all four stages can last an entire year to develop.

It is important to have a clear understanding of the type of app you are looking to develop first and then predict your time frame based on the features desired.

Looking for more insight on UX design services? Are you wanting to develop an app and you need to know the cost to develop an app is? Visit Codal’s blog, or come talk to us here! We’d love to hear from you.

Five Ways to Improve the Mobile Checkout Process

The checkout process is arguably the most important step on an eCommerce and mCommerce platform, but unfortunately companies are struggling to optimizing to convert shoppers. As many as 60-75 percent of online shopping carts are abandoned equating to roughly $18 billion annual loss due to this shopping cart abandonment.

Thus, there is a substantial need for companies to employ user experience design services and even potentially mobile app development companies to ensure the mobile checkout process is fully optimized.

Below are five areas that a mobile app and design development team should focus on when refining the checkout process.

1. Utilize all mobile capabilities

The advancement of mobile technology is one that offers retailers opportunities they have not been able to incorporate on an eCommerce platform. The two capabilities to highlight are geo-tracking and the mobile wallet.

Geo-tracking allows the retailer to provide the option of delivering the particular item to the current location of the user. This ability would be particularly useful for those users ordering at home, allowing them to skip filling out all the fields pertaining to their address.

Next, the mobile wallet offers the ability to directly obtain the payment information from the user. Especially since credit card information is an annoying process for the user, it is in the best interest to provide an alternative in which the fields will be filled out for them using their mobile wallet.

2. Improve load time

Long load time has a significant impact on losing conversions on a mobile app or website. According to research, when a checkout page on a mobile device takes four seconds to load, the cart abandonment rate reaches 25%.

For every second the app or website is taking to load, the rate of lost customers remarkably increases. Thus, working with a mobile app development company to improve this load time will help the overall sales.

3. Simplify the process

Developing an easy to use and simple checkout process is critical in improving the conversion rate. Two areas of focus to make sure it is simplified is ensuring the call to actions stand out and that the checkout flow is shortened.

Incorporating strong and direct CTA’s is an essential component to the checkout process. Without continuous and direct steps for the user, the potential for confusement increases. For more information about how to improve CTA’s check out this blog.

Minimizing the number of steps of the checkout flow will greatly improve conversions. Just as a long line in a physical store may dissuade a shopper from purchasing, so too does a lengthy checkout flow result in cart abandonment.

4. Remove distractions

Getting the user to be in the process of purchasing is the exact position retailers want. Thus, completing the transaction should be the main priority of the site, eliminating all other distractions.

One of the distractions that may result in a loss of a customer is offering additional products. Instead of upselling or cross selling during the checkout process, retailers need to either do so when the user adds the item to the cart or offer to them once the purchase has gone through.

Another distraction to eliminate is any form of advertisement, whether that be banner ads or pop up ads. Including those ads on the site as a form of revenue does not make sense if it dissuades users from completing their purchases.

5. Enhance trust

Research suggests that 17% of shoppers ditch their carts if they have concerns about payment security. Offering a form of proof to the users indicating that the app or website is secure will greatly impact the perception of trustworthiness. Some form of proof that can be used are trust icons, testimonials, and reviews.
Conclusion

When it comes to developing an app or mobile website, one of the areas of main focus should be the checkout process. An analogy that can be drawn to losing a user during checkout is a quarterback throwing a last second interception to lose the game, when all he had to do was take a knee to win.

Don’t be that quarterback, hire a mobile app development company.

Looking for more insight on UX design services? Are you wanting to develop an app and you need to know the cost to make an app is? Visit Codal’s blog, or come talk to us (go@codal.com)! We’d love to hear from you.

Mobile Load Time Effect on UX Design

The advancement of technology has created the common user’s expectation to not only solve their problems quickly, but instantaneously. Users expect that when they inquire about the weather on their mobile device, an immediate response of a seven day forecast of the temperature and potential precipitation should be displayed.

As short as a five second delay on the response can lead to the user being irritated and frustrated with the particular application. In order to avoid these newly found pain points in the user, UX designers need to fully understand the user’s expectations on load times to ensure the development is up to the standards of the user.

Key Time Indicators
Research done during UX research services have discovered that websites and mobile applications have 100ms to respond to a user before they notice a lag. Once this lag is noticed it does not take much more time for the user to be annoyed.

Beyond the one second (1,000 ms) time frame the user will start to lose focus on the task that was performing. It is critical to not allow it to reach this point without providing any response to the user. The rule of thumb is for anything taking longer than 500 ms to load, you should be providing feedback to the user.

The Gold Standard: Google’s RAIL Model
Google is a driving force on where majority of users are developing their expectations. The faster Google operates, the faster the standard becomes. Google measures their performance of load time by using the RAIL Model.

RAIL stands for response, animation, idle and load. For Google’s standard responsiveness, their mobile websites must occur within 100 ms to satisfy the user. The goal for animation and idle is the page should is expected to load less than 1/10 of a second.

The load time is the biggest focus by Google, having a standard of 1 second for load time. This is a goal that Google sets for it’s own search engine.

Practical Goals
Although the standard set by Google is one that all mobile application development agencies should strive for, it is not necessarily always practical. A reasonable standard that all websites and apps need to follow to maintain a good UX is a load time less than 4 seconds.

Currently, the average load time for most pages on the web is 7 seconds, which is significantly longer than where they should be. Cutting this load time in half would greatly improve the UX of the website or app.

Load Time Affects Conversions
Some of the statistics to keep in mind when developing a website or app to fit these criteria is that on a m-commerce platform, 40% of abandon the site if the load time is longer than 3 seconds. Then with each additional second of loading, there is a 7% reduction in conversions.

Conclusion
Keeping in mind these metrics are critical for the user experience and ensuring optimization of a website or mobile app. If you are noticing a lag in your load time, you should consider developing your website or app with web development agency. The loss in revenue from the loss in conversions could require the help of an expert team.

Looking for more insight on UX design services? Are you wanting to develop an app and you need to know the cost to develop an app is? Visit Codal’s blog, or come talk to us here! We’d love to hear from you.