Designing an app can be challenging, especially when you are about to do it for the first time.

You have multiple paths to take, from sketching it on your own, to hiring a professional designer. Here, we’ll describe how the process looklike with our agency and what will be the result. Lastly, we’ll explain what’s required for the design phase, and what’s are the next steps.

What I can promise is, during the design phase, you will learn about your app more than you think.

Why would you need a design?

• To visualize your idea
• To establish the user flows and processes in the app
• To briefly present it to the investors or potential users
• To start the development process and be on the same page as the programmers

Before we start, let’s face the elephant in the room.

Can you do the design of the app without TH-EY?

Of course, you can also implement and ship it, everything is a matter of budget and time.

At the end of the article, we’ll list 9 tools you can use to work on the designs. But I want to point one important factor – design is not only about the visuals. It’s also about the user flows, UX, simplicity, and user-friendliness. Nevertheless, definitely your visualisation will speed up the understanding, and can be taken over by the agency.

So, in any case, it’s a very useful exercise for any founder.

What’s required to start?

1. Brief (description) of your project.
2. Free initial workshop is done.
3. Contract with TH-EY for the Design & Discovery

What will the process look like with TH-EY?

I assume, at this stage, you will be after the Design & Discovery process kicked off, we have the NDA in place, and we are after the free initial workshop.

We can start creating. Like any process in our company, we work in weekly iterations, that include:

• Our work – research, gathering ideas, building the components, views, and features
• Status call – where we present what we’ve done from the last meeting, gather your feedback, and discuss the next steps
• Your review, feedback, and additional research – we know that during the process, we discover cases, that were not envisioned upfront, which is great. If that’s needed, there is a space for your review and decisions, which can influence the direction we go.

Then the iteration repeats.

What’s important, is that are fully transparent in this process.

You have the access to:

• Our Slack (messaging app) and can talk directly to the team
• Figma – where we are building the final design, but also gather the ideas, inspirations, etc.
• Roadmap – iterations plan and expected timeline
• Work logs (Cost) – where you can see how much time we spend a given week on your project and where we are against the estimation.

At any point, we can limit or extend the scope of work, according to your needs.

How is the process different from other agencies?

The main difference is, that, by heart, we are a software development company.

Which is why, we include the developers consulting, to make sure what’s design will be easy to implement, and the designer is not reinventing the wheel. We also add the Quality Assurance specialist, who will make sure upfront, that we thought about the corner cases and potential problems. Lastly, one of the company directors is reviewing the project, and they’ve seen over 100 applications.

This way we make sure, that whatever developer will be implementing the app, his work will be 10x easier than on the app only seen by the designer.

Who will you be working with?

During the sales process, you will probably talk to one of the company directors and possibly a Virtual Assistant for the formalities.

In the initial workshop, you will talk to the UI/UX specialist, director, and optionally a developer.

The main part of the work, at this stage, will be done by the UI/UX specialist. It will be your main point of contact over the iterations.

Lastly, we add the developer and QA consulting, who may or may not join your calls, or be coordinated by the UI/UX specialist.

What will be the result?

Here is an example of the final result in Figma:

At the first glance, you will see a set of pages, wireframes, and the style guide. This is probably what you will get from any UI/UX agency. What’s different, from our perspective, is the path we take to this final result and the consulting we add in the process.

As a bonus, we add a brief introduction to Figma, so you can effectively work with us, leave your comments, and collaborate directly with the designer.

What’s next?

After the design is done, we have multiple paths to take, depending on your needs.

1. Finish the cooperation with us – we will provide you with all the materials developed in the process.
2. Extend the design into a clickable prototype – still in Figma, but you can show it to potential investors, users, etc.
3. Prepare the pitch deck, presentation, or brief of your application.
4. Build user stories – which can be taken by the developers for the implementation.
5. Estimate the development phase.

Summary

Design is the first step to fully describing your application.

It is up to you, what you are about to do it afterwards, but definitely it will be a useful experience for you. It is also exciting to convert your ideas and descriptions that pile up in your head over the time, into something that you can share with others. The process we designed for this purpose will make sure, it’s also user-friendly and easy to develop.

In case we missed anything in the description, please don’t hesitate to ask through the form below.

As promised – 9 ways to create the app without TH-EY and any other designer

AI tools, that will help you start

1. Uizard – Turn product ideas into concepts instantly with GenAI
2. Visily – Text to Design Instantly generate a beautiful, fully editable design with a simple text prompt
3. Magic Patterns – Prototype your product ideas with AI.

Simple sketching / mock-up tools, that will help you start from scratch

4. Balsamiq – the closest you can get to the pen and paper

5. UXPin – Design beautiful, detailed user interfaces faster than ever before

6. Moqups – Wireframe, Diagram & Whiteboard Online

More advanced tools, used by the professionals

7. Figma – slowly getting to the position of an industry standard

8. Sketch – another great tool, used by many professionals

9. Adobe XD – last but not least, a very popular tool by Adobe