No-code tools and their democratizing power for designers
By: Josefina Blattmann
Tags: Makers, No Code, Designer, UX, UX Design

Over the past couple of years, the rise of the no-code movement has started to change the landscape of tech. Designers can now build powerful apps and webs that can scale for any organization — without writing any code. Let’s take a deeper dive into no-code software and no-code tools.

The ability to learn new things and adopt new technologies, while progressing with your work accordingly, is a crucial skill for any designer, especially freelancers. With our lives and every business strategy increasingly dictated by screens, webs, and, basically, the Internet, the importance of digital design and coding is soaring. Fortunately, there’s a whole world of no-code tools allowing designers to make a leap into creating software.

It is no longer necessary for a designer to work together with a developer in every project they are involved in. The worlds of no-code software and design are colliding at a rapid rate and real software is being created without writing code for the first time ever.

This movement rests upon the belief that tech should enable creation rather than stress it. Crafting an app, or building a website has always been out of reach for designers. Today tools like Webflow, Bubble, Bravo Studio, Buildbox or Shopify are enabling designers to navigate a space that used to be open only for developers. No-code tools have removed the obstacle of having to learn programming languages. Now anyone can bring their ideas to life.

Plus, no-code software allows anyone to build products 10x faster than with traditional development. Being able to build your own app, spending a controlled budget, and determining its viability is huge.

No-code case studies and tools

There are so many tools around that it can seem a bit overwhelming to dive into this world. In addition to that, sometimes it’s difficult to understand exactly what we can do with each of them. I’ve been analyzing no-code directories and resources (such as nocodelist, zeroqode and nocode.tech) for a while now, so I’ve decided to put together a couple of cool case studies built in Webflow, Bravo Studio, and Billflow for you to get inspired.

HelloSign — Marketing pages built with Webflow

Let’s kickoff with a classic no-code drag & drop tool: Webflow.

HelloSign, a Dropbox company that adds legal eSignatures to documents, runs all of their marketing pages through this platform, letting their design and marketing team own web publishing without the help of developers. Before moving to Webflow, HelloSign’s marketing website lived in their main application, so all the changes and updates their marketing team wanted to make had to be routed through the product team. With this setup, it took three weeks to get changes to the website live. On the other side of the equation, their product engineers were spending valuable development time working on the marketing website, which meant less time focusing on the product.

Shop Cartooli — A native mobile app built with Bravo Studio

Bravo Studio is a no-code app builder that enables you to build your own apps. It works with Figma and Adobe XD and fosters design flexibility.

Shop Cartooli, an e-commerce site that helps artisans sell their products to customers around the globe, needed a mobile application. Both users and sellers were demanding this and they wanted to act quickly and make it easier for them to access their platform on mobile devices. However, they are a small business with in-house designers and no developers so they couldn’t afford traditional development.

They used Bravo Studio to turn their Shopify into a native mobile app. They were able to prototype a native iOS app based on their Shopify store and then launch it with their own branding and keep each and every functionality.

Hopin — Billing pages built with Billflow

Billflow is the best no-code solution if you’re looking for a fast and easy way to create billing pages.

Hopin, an online events platform, needed to improve their customers’ overall payment experience and reduce their billing development load. They did so using Billflow. First, they connected the app to their Stripe account, then they customized their pages to fit their branding and optimized the payment experience for their customers.

Other tools you might find interesting:

Carrd: simple single page websites

Scapic: AR/VR/3D experiences in your browser

Readymag: online magazine webs

Sheet2Site: turn a Google Sheet into a website

Rive: real-time interactive animations, for any platform

BigRadar: chatbots and customer engagement

The power unlocked by Webflow, Bravo Studio, Billflow, and any of these tools will certainly allow designers to take their creativity to the next level. You can build your own app, create animations, turn Airtable sheets into websites, and a lot more. Designers just need to take a moment to explore these tools and encourage themselves to begin to add them to their current stack.