Kony unveils new mobile app design and development solution

ORLANDO, US: Kony, Inc., the leading enterprise mobility company, has announced Kony Visualizer, a revolutionary new mobile app design solution that enables business users, designers and developers to collaborate and rapidly create native and Web mobile app experiences for iOS, Android, Windows and the Web. With the introduction of this innovative product, Kony is helping businesses not only design amazing app user experiences but also streamline the app development process in order to cut the time it takes to design and develop great mobile applications by half. The next generation Kony Visualizer 2.0 will be available for limited release next month.

“A major inhibitor to successful enterprise mobile app adoption is the huge gap between what the business stakeholder expects and what IT delivers. We’ve heard from our customers that the majority of defects found in apps are directly related to the user interface design and experience,” said Burley Kawasaki, senior vice president of products, Kony, Inc. “To solve this issue, we have built Kony Visualizer to fundamentally change the process of creating stunning mobile app designs. By providing a single solution that enables collaboration across all stages of the mobile app design process, we are empowering app designers, developers and business analysts to work together in a much more cohesive manner.”

The challenge with the current app development process is a lack of mobile-first design tools that enable users to build cross-platform, multi-edge user experience for phones, tablets, watches and other newer device form factors. In today’s silo’ed business environment, each team of app designers tend to use different tools and capabilities to create static assets that are usually not translated well in the development process. This approach to app design and development creates inefficiencies and misrepresentation of the business use cases, due to the various hand-offs that take place at every stage in the software development lifecycle.

“Developers, designers and business users need a means to rapidly prototype native and web applications, have them quickly previewed by all stakeholders on actual mobile devices, and enable stakeholders to provide real-time feedback from when the application is created to when it is deployed. Essentially enterprises need a compressed lifecycle where at all stages the stakeholders are as close during pre-production to what the end-users will themselves ultimately experience,” said Chris Marsh, principal analyst, Enterprise Mobile App Strategies, 451 Research.

Kony Visualizer is the first product that allows users to immediately create click-through preview apps without manual software coding, and instantly view, publish and share the app preview on mobile phones, tablets and other mobile devices via the Kony Visualizer cloud collaboration services. Kony calls this new capability “WYSIWYM” (what you see is what you mobilize). Using rapid iterative design and development, this greatly reduces the effort related to app design and user experience testing, ultimately gaining quick and satisfactory approvals from business owners. In addition, Kony Visualizer provides a seamless collaborative cloud environment for real-time feedback and iteration, which addresses a need by a growing number of business groups that are leveraging both in-house IT and outside design firms for their mobile app development projects.

With Kony Visualizer 2.0 and latest generation of Kony’s multi-edge development framework, organizations can dramatically reduce the time and cost it takes to design and develop a mobile app by taking advantage of:

Stunning user experiences – design your mobile app within Kony Visualizer using the richest user experiences available on native devices including advanced cross platform layout, layering and animations, switch between iOS, Android, and Windows devices in the app canvas to design and instantly preview the native look and feel.

Codeless app design – designers or business users can drag and drop using a graphical WYSIWYM canvas to create your app with pixel-perfect layout; and define complex user interactions - including animation, navigation, even advanced device interactions - all without writing code!

Greater Collaboration Capabilities: Designers, business users and developers can quickly and easily collaborate on projects across their team in real-time. Using the power of Kony Visualizer cloud-based collaboration services, the project can be published to the cloud and viewed on native devices - providing instant feedback on the app design.

Accelerated Productivity: Be productive and efficient in your app design with collections, re-using assets and functionality throughout all of the apps from a single library. Integrate with other tools in the workflow, such as Adobe Photoshop, to import the styles directly into Visualizer with no re-work.

Re-usable App Generation: Kony Visualizer enables application designer and developers to create the actual application user experience backed by generated application code that is re-usable by developers for any subsequent apps that they wish to build, which essentially eliminates the need for throw-away prototypes, which is a common practice in today’s mobile app design and development process.

Pricing and Availability

Kony Visualizer 2.0 limited release will be released next month. The current Kony Visualizer release is available globally today. Go to http://www.kony.com/trials to learn more.