Prototypes Just Got Real

This article is for those who I’ve connected with during the many user testing sessions this year AND those who have just heard about Bravo Studio. If you don’t know about us yet then hey, I guess it’s your lucky day!

First and foremost, I would like to thank all of you who have provided incredibly valuable feedback during our soft-launch. It has really helped us build something even greater, and we will soon release what we think will be a real game-changer.

Generally, prototyping tools intend to help you achieve the most realistic design or close to finished product. Whether you are an entrepreneur trying to showcase your million dollar app idea or part of a design team needing to continuously test and validate new UX and UIs, you want to show something that looks and feels real.

Do more with less

With countless design & prototyping tools available today, it can be confusing to know which ones are the best to get your job done. Lucky for us, the tools are increasingly doing more across the designer workflow, lessening the need to switch between them as often, which can massively improve your design output.

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We have taken this idea even further with Bravo Studio. With the growing number of cloud-based third-party tools like Airtable and Contentful and powerful CRMs like Salesforce granting the world easy access to their data through APIs, it seems practical to bring that data into design too.

Why stop there? If we have the design and data available, then it is only a small step to bringing it all together to make a fully functioning native app.

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Considering the potential of building a platform that could easily connect and communicate with external data sources, we built Bravo Studio and its API integrator; a platform that allows you to design in Figma (and soon other beloved design tools) and convert your designs into native iOS and Android mobile apps instantly, no code required.

What about the “end of prototyping”?

It’s about time that designers have control over the entire digital product creation process, without the pressure to learn to code or depend on developers to implement functionality. “Wait, are you saying you want to get rid of our dev teams?” NO, absolutely not. We want our developer friends to focus on more complex stuff like developing new API-connected software or improving existing ones so that we can build our apps on top of them.

So how does Bravo work?

Once you have designed and prototyped your app in Figma, you are just two steps away from publishing your app on App Store and Google Play Store:

1. Import your Figma file to Bravo Studio.

2. Connect your app to an external data source. Let’s say you have a product list built-in Airtable;

3. Each product will have images, product title, description, etc… which can be mapped to individual elements in your design.

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4. You can now test and experience your fully functional app in Bravo Vision, our mobile previewer. If everything looks good, you can request the app bundles (IPA for iOS and APK for Android) so you can upload the app to an app store.

Like Airtable, there are plenty of third-party tools working hard to make their APIs easy to use, such as CRMs like Salesforce and Pipedrive, sports and fitness platforms like Strava, and e-commerce platforms like Shopify. Imagine the possibilities when your Dribbble posts can become actual apps! At Bravo, we know ours will be.

Is it really the end of non-functional prototypes?

Well, we could at least say that it’s the beginning of a new era for designers with Bravo Studio, enabling you to take control when designing and building mobile apps.

We can’t wait to hear your feedback on the release of our Bravo API integrator, so make sure you have signed up on our website to be the first to connect your design to data. Just like the real thing.