Turn Your Data Into a Halloween Treat with WebDataRocks
Spooky atmosphere is everywhere in the air, and WebDataRocks isn’t staying behind!
Our grid is highly flexible, allowing you to easily change its look and style to suit any theme or event. Since it’s Halloween, we want to show you a few fun examples to demonstrate you features for customizing your reports and making them more exciting!
So, let’s start!
Rating of Candies with WebDataRocks
Did you know that Halloween 2025 is expected to be the most expensive one? Total spending on candy is anticipated to reach $3.9 billion! It’s evident that candies are an essential part of this holiday. But which sweets do people love the most, and which are likely to be left at the bottom of buckets?
All this info you can find in our demo:
Every candy rating is colored based on how much people love (or don’t love) it:
Top-rated treats are colored orange, and lower-rated ones are yellow.
We easily achieve this using our conditional formatting. You can set it up using our toolbar, or this snippet of code:
conditions: [
{
formula: "#value >= 4",
format: {
backgroundColor: "#ff9933",
color: "#000000"
}
},
{
formula: "#value <= 2",
format: {
backgroundColor: "#ffcd55",
color: "#000000"
}
}
]
Pumpkin WebDataRocks and Highcharts
Okay, now what first comes to your mind when you hear “Halloween”? Most likely it’s pumpkins. They’ve become a defining symbol of this holiday, but have you ever considered which state has the most expensive ones and how their prices fluctuate throughout the entire Halloween season?
This demo will help you find out! You can see how they vary by color, and thanks to Highcharts, our dashboard has become more interactive and easier to use for valuable insights.
Look at these toolbar icons! Would you also like to customize your own to add a festive atmosphere?
This can be done using the beforetoolbarcreated property in WebDataRocks:
var pivot = new WebDataRocks({
container: "#wdr-component",
toolbar: true,
beforetoolbarcreated: customizeToolbar,
height: 500,
…
});
function customizeToolbar(toolbar) {
const tabs = toolbar.getTabs();
toolbar.getTabs = function () {
for (let i = 0; i < tabs.length; i++) {
switch (i % 4) {
case 0:
tabs[i].icon = `<img width=30 height=30 src="https://cdn-icons-png.flaticon.com/512/6433/6433146.png"/>`;
break;
case 1:
tabs[i].icon = `<img width=30 height=30 src="https://cdn-icons-png.flaticon.com/512/3330/3330533.png"/>`;
break;
case 2:
tabs[i].icon = `<img width=30 height=30 src="https://cdn-icons-png.flaticon.com/512/8490/8490308.png"/>`;
break;
case 3:
tabs[i].icon = `<img width=30 height=30 src="https://cdn-icons-png.flaticon.com/512/3277/3277415.png"/>`;
break;
}
}
return tabs;
};
}
If you want to style your toolbar even further, we recommend reading our Toolbar documentation to explore all the possibilities.
Halloween Time with WebDataRocks
Still not enough spooky atmosphere? Horror movies are gonna fix it!
Advanced Television mentions that nearly 3 in 5 people worldwide (59%) are likely to pick a horror movie or show over other genres during the autumn season. Horror is especially popular in Mexico (76%), Spain (71%), and the US (61%).
In our demo, you can see both movie lengths and ratings, or explore whether longer movies receive better ratings or if shorter ones are more popular.
The thing is that the Runtime column is stored as seconds in the dataset, but WebDataRocks automatically converts it into the familiar HH:MM:SS format. This makes it much easier to work with durations and compare movie lengths, since everyone is used to reading time this way.
function getData() {
return [
{
"Movie Title": {
caption: "Movie Title",
type: "string"
},
"Movie Year": {
caption: "Movie Year",
type: "string"
},
Runtime: {
caption: "Runtime",
type: "time"
…
},Now it’s much easier to choose what to watch this Halloween movie night!
So we can confidently say that you’re ready to dive into your own Halloween dashboards and uncover all the seasonal insights. You can customize it for any needs, and we hope these examples were helpful and brought you some festive mood!
What else to read?
Storytelling with data is a must-have 21st-century skill. Whether you are a marketer, a business analyst, or a data scientist, you will need to be able to communicate your findings to others in a simple and concise way. Data visualization is an effective tool that can help you with your data.
To turn raw data into insights, it is essential to acquire skills and master techniques for working effectively with data. That’s where data visualization blogs come in handy.
Data visualization blogs are a great resource for learning about data visualization techniques and best practices. They can help you to get a better understanding of your data, to come up with new ideas for data visualizations, and to improve your storytelling skills.
We have compiled a list of excellent blogs that we believe will help you improve your storytelling-based data visualization skills. We hope that this article will help you to find the data visualization blogs that are right for you.
Information is beautiful
Information is Beautiful is a blog by David McCandless, known for its visually stunning and informative data visualizations. As soon as you are taken to its main page, you may become struck by rich and engaging visualizations. The blog’s mission is to show how to present data in captivating graphics and make the numbers speak loudly. The visualizations provided offer insightful answers to a wide range of pertinent questions spanning demographics, politics, economics, and more.
For example, check out interactive infographics about Hollywood films and see it with your own eyes.
Flowing Data
Flowing Data is an exploration of the impact of data on our everyday lives. Founded by statistician Nathan Yau. This blog offers a fresh perspective on data visualization, combining data, art, and storytelling, and covers a variety of topics.
FlowingData is a veritable paradise for R programmers and statisticians. Besides, it contains versatile content for all tastes and purposes.
Here, you not only gain a deeper understanding of how data shapes our daily lives, but also learn how to create visualizations like an expert (mostly in R). We highly recommend paying attention to the guides which focus on specific topics and courses which explain in a step-by-step manner how to excel at data visualization in R.
Cool Infographics
Cool Infographics is a blog that showcases the best infographics from the web. It is run by Randy Krum, a data visualization expert. The blog explores various topics, such as science, technology, business, and social issues. It also offers helpful articles on how to create and use infographics effectively.
This blog is a valuable resource worth following if you’re fascinated by infographics.
DataQuest Blog
The DataQuest Blog is a treasure trove of up-to-date articles dedicated to data science and career paths. You can get here the essential knowledge required to become a skilled data scientist, reveal new ways of working with data and discover scholarships. Whether you are a Python or R programmer, you’ll find something beneficial for yourself. At your service, there are career tips that help sharpen both technical and soft skills, student stories and courses which are divided into missions for convenience – such a breaking a big task into smaller ones help you feel less overwhelmed with studying new things.
The blog gives you the feeling that the content is created with the care of learning experience and keeping students motivated and deeply engaged in what they are studying.
Here you have an opportunity to learn the building concepts of data science and choose your own path you want to excel at.
Gitconnected
One more valuable source for staying up-to-date with the latest news and trends in software development and technologies. Here, you can explore insightful articles that review the functionalities of different frameworks, find great tutorials and many other educational materials While this website not focused on data visualization, it still serves as a valuable source of practical knowledge that you can apply to your data visualization projects.
In addition, Gitconnected has a blog – the LevelUP Coding. That is a great resource for learning about the features, advantages, and disadvantages of different JavaScript data visualization libraries. You can use this information to choose the library that best suits your data visualization project needs. Do you want to be the first to test the grid with your data?
The Economist: Graphic detail
The Economist: Graphic Detail is a blog that showcases the best of data journalism and data storytelling from The Economist magazine. It is run by the magazine’s talented graphics team, who create high-quality infographics and data visualizations on various topics, such as economics, business, politics, and social issues. The blog is updated every weekday and features daily charts that reflect the expertise and interests of the journalists. If you are interested in data-driven insights and compelling visuals, The Economist: Graphic Detail is a blog worth following.
Tableau Blog
The Tableau Public Blog is a must-follow resource for anyone using Tableau for data visualization. It is a blog that teaches you how to use Tableau for data visualization. It has tutorials, case studies, and tips from Tableau experts around the world. Here you’ll find not only product updates, news, and useful tips, but also lets you see’ll how other data analysts use data to make a difference. Here you can dive into experiences of like-minded people from all over the world, learn about the social impact of data and become motivated to start new data visualization projects.
Data Visualization Communities on Reddit
Blogs are great for structured, expert advice, but sometimes, the best way to learn is by actually talking to other people who are figuring things out too. That’s when Reddit comes in. It’s a great place where you can find communities to share projects, ask questions, discuss tools, get inspired, and more.
Subreddits for Data Visualization
r/dataisbeautiful
This is probably the first subreddit you’ll come across. r/dataisbeautiful is dedicated to showcasing polished and interesting visualizations on a wide range of topics, from global economics to pop culture trends. It’s a goldmine for inspiration and a good place to see what types of visuals catch people’s attention and make complex data easy to grasp.
r/dataviz
While r/dataisbeautiful is mostly about finished projects, r/dataviz is where the behind-the-scenes conversations happen. Here, people talk about how to build visualizations, which tools to use, what makes a chart misleading or effective, and so on.
r/visualization
This one leans a bit more toward theory and research. This subreddit explores the why behind effective visual communication, things like perception, cognition, and design principles. It’s a good place if you’re curious about the science behind what makes visualizations work (or fail), or if you enjoy discovering new open-source tools and tutorials.
Final words
We hope you enjoyed this article and found some data visualization blogs that suit your interests and needs. These blogs are excellent sources of inspiration, learning, and insight for anyone who wants to create engaging and effective data visualization. They show you how to use data visualization tools, techniques, and best practices to communicate your data clearly and persuasively.
We hope that these blogs will inspire you to explore different data visualization methods and styles. Data visualization is a powerful way to communicate your business data effectively. You can also check out this article with the resources for developers to read, which can help you improve and polish your skills in data visualization and other areas.
So, don’t hesitate and start your data visualization adventure today!
Are you ready for Halloween?
In celebration of this spooky holiday, we’ve decided to pick top WebDataRocks samples dedicated to Halloween. Not only you’ll play with fun demos but also learn how to create analytical reports based on any kind of data.
Let’s start!
A dashboard for analysis of pumpkin prices
See the Pen Halloween demo with WebDataRocks and Highcharts: pumpkin prices analysis by WebDataRocks (@webdatarocks) on CodePen.
More than 1.5 billion pounds of pumpkin are grown in the US each year. What are their prices? In this demo, you’ll see how to analyze the prices of pumpkins that are grown in different cities of the US and varied by size, color, package, and grade. You may even notice the trends in how the prices change depending on the season.
The only tools you need to create such an interactive dashboard are WebDataRocks and Highcharts – JavaScript libraries for reporting and data visualization. With WebDataRocks, you can pre-process data before further visualization. Simply load it into the pivot, arrange the fields on the grid, aggregate the data, sort it and highlight important cells. With Highcharts, you can build custom charts based on the summarized data retrieved from WebDataRocks Pivot.
The entire process is as simple as a pumpkin pie – you can find all the instructions in the guide and learn how to make the pivot table and charts work together swiftly.
As a result, you get a ready-to-use tool for generating insightful reports in PDF, HTML, or Excel.
Analysis of IMDB Horror Movie Dataset with WebDataRocks and FusionCharts
See the Pen WebDataRocks: Analysis of IMDB Horror Movie Dataset by WebDataRocks (@webdatarocks) on CodePen.
What’s your favorite way to celebrate Halloween? If you’re searching for a creepy movie to watch on All Hallows Eve – great news! We did it for you!
The next demo is built using WebDataRocks and FusionCharts. With it, you’ll find the movies with the highest rankings grouped by genres and release dates.
The last but not least – the dashboard is dark-themed, meaning you can apply dark styles both to WebDataRocks and FusionCharts.
What else can match the mood of Halloween if not the black color?
Candy Power Ranking Analysis with WebDataRocks Pivot
See the Pen WebDataRocks Pivot: Analysis of Candy Power Ranking by WebDataRocks (@webdatarocks) on CodePen.
Not a big fan of pumpkins and horror movies? Looking forward to Halloween just for the sake of Halloween candies?
If you have a sweet tooth, this demo is for you.
With the Candy Power Ranking data set and WebDataRocks Pivot, you’ll discover the most and the least popular Halloween candies, as well as the sweetest and the most expensive ones. Try rearranging the report’s fields to group the candies by constituents and extract new insights from the data.
Explore Pivot Table’s features
If you’d like to take a closer look at the out-of-the-box features of WebDataRocks Pivot, you are welcome to see our comprehensive UI guide that covers every piece of functionality available to the end-users.
If you are more interested in how to configure the reporting tool with code, check out our API reference and get hands-on experience with demos on CodePen.
References
All the demos mentioned in the blog post are based on the data from Kaggle.
Feel free to download the full data sets, connect them to the pivot table and come up with your own way of the report’s layout. Take the full advantage of filtering, aggregating, sorting, drag-and-drop, and drill-down features – they are designed exactly for bringing your reporting to new heights.
What else to read?
The right choice of web reporting tool can be a crucial factor for any data-driven business. Software development is a truly complex process that requires managing and coordinating many different modules and components for a reporting solution to work flawlessly. So in this article, we decided to dive into the exciting world of JavaScript libraries and components for report applications, web reporting tools, or software with reporting elements and created a collection of the best JavaScript libraries for report applications.
(more…)As you may have already noticed, we love participating in CodePen Challenges! This time, the topic was “food”, so we decided to use a dataset that is familiar to everyone — McDonald’s menu items. You can find McDonald’s almost everywhere, and their burgers? Loved by lots of people. We thought it’d be fun to turn their menu data into an insightful visual report.
(more…)
Data Warehouse is a single repository to store all the data from an organization’s databases and related sources in one place. All the forms of structured and unstructured data in different formats and visualizations are extracted from the organization and transformed. Depending upon an organization’s approach, data could be transformed before or after loading into the Warehouse.
Besides acting as a single source of truth for your organization, Data Warehouse services offer storing large amounts of data, finding correlation patterns, and recognition for business decision-making. It effectively helps in data analytics, visualizations, and reporting.
(more…)
The human brain processes visual cues faster than written ones. According to Visme (2022), 90% of the information communicated to our brain is visual. This is why utilizing visual aids in problem-solving helps people to find solutions faster. Visual problem-solving refers to the process of finding solutions to problems with the use of visual aids like flowcharts, diagrams, maps, infographics, etc. In simple terms, you solve problems using visual aids. This method helps people understand the situation better as visual tools showcase how elements relate to each other more clearly.
The significance of visual data representation lies in its ability to make people see and understand data easier and better. With visual elements, complex data becomes easier to grasp so that everyone can understand them no matter their level of expertise. Visual data representation also helps businesses to gather insight from vast amounts of data. It simplifies data representation and allows it to be used efficiently by entrepreneurs.
The Role of Visual Data Representation in Problem-Solving
1. Communicating Complex Information
Visual data representation can transform complex ideas into simple information, making them easier to communicate to other people. It can bridge gaps in the communication process, especially when working with people from different backgrounds and levels of expertise. Visual data representation makes it faster to disseminate concepts, findings, and solutions to others, enabling efficient collaboration within teams.
2. Enhancing Understanding and Analysis
Visual data representation makes individuals understand and analyze complicated problems more easily. Visual tools to convey data and abstract ideas can make complex concepts easier to grasp, particularly when handling and analyzing essential aspects and relationships within a problem. It aids in breaking down difficult problems transforming them into smaller components that are easier to manage and understand.
3. Enabling Informed Decision-Making
Visual data representation enables informed decision-making. Visualization tools help people evaluate and compare different concepts or solutions, allowing for more informed decision-making. Its decomposition of complex problems into manageable components allows for a more structured problem-solving process. Furthermore, it reduces the probability of having cognitive biases that may affect choices.
Types of Visual Data Representation
1. Graphs and Charts
a. Line Graphs
A line graph is a chart that displays a line joining several points or a line that shows the relationship between two points. It is commonly used to display data or information that changes over time. It consists of the horizontal “x-axis” and vertex “y-axis”.
b. Bar Charts
A bar chart is a graph that displays categorical data using horizontal or vertical bars with heights or lengths in proportion to the values they represent. It is commonly used to present categorical and discrete or continuous variables grouped in class intervals.
c. Pie Charts
A pie chart is a circular graph that is divided into slices or sectors to present numerical proportions. The length or size of each slice or section is proportional to the data it is meant to represent.
2. Infographics
a. Visual Storytelling Through Data
An infographic is a visual image used to represent information, data, or knowledge. It tells a story visually through data, enabling a more compelling way to make people learn and understand information. An infographic with good visual storytelling includes great content, typography, colors, symbols, grids, hierarchies, icons, white space, and more. You can create and enhance your infographics by using a background remover to efficiently remove unnecessary backgrounds from the visual elements in your infographic so people can focus more on the visual storytelling and not get distracted.
b. Combining Text and Graphics for Clarity
Infographics provide clarity by combining text and graphics. It helps in summarizing complex situations, managing information, heightening engagement, and increasing comprehension. By having graphics and text together, infographics give a clearer view of the data or information presented so different individuals can easily understand them.
3. Heatmaps and Treemaps
a. Identifying Patterns in Data Density
A heatmap is a 2D data visualization tool that represents data using colors to show density or magnitude. Heatmaps are commonly used in marketing, website analytics, and consumer behavior. For example, heatmaps are used to display the behavior of users on a website through pattern recognition. Particular colors are used to show the website’s frequent and infrequent clicks.
b. Hierarchical Representation of Information
A treemap is another data visualization tool used to showcase the hierarchical representation of information. It includes nested rectangles which represent categories within the area in a “tree”. Individuals can compare and display the hierarchy, quantity, and pattern based on their space on the chart.
5 Tips on How to Visualize Data to Facilitate Problem-Solving
1. Identify Trends and Patterns
a. Recognizing Correlations in Data
You can visualize data by recognizing their correlations. Once you know their relationship, you get to group them, identify patterns and trends, or display their correlation visually to enable faster communication and more efficient problem-solving.
b. Uncovering Anomalies and Outliers
Anomaly and outlier detection is another power of data visualization. You get to uncover anomalies and outliers that pertain to data that are significantly different from other data. By detecting these, you get to know what area you should focus on during problem-solving.
2. Simplify Complex Information
a. Condensing Large Datasets
Data visualization tools like charts allow you to break down or condense large datasets into smaller and easy-to-understand formats. You categorize data or divide them into groups instead of just seeing them as a whole. By simplifying large amounts of data, it is easier to get insights and show findings you won’t get just by looking at the raw datasets.
b. Enhancing Data Accessibility for Stakeholders
By making complex data easier to understand, you enhance their accessibility for stakeholders. Your stakeholders, whatever their profession or level of expertise, can easily grasp the information you want to deliver because you have made the data accessible enough for them to understand quickly. This allows for more effective communication between you and your stakeholders.
3. Support Hypothesis Testing
a. Visual Confirmation or Refutation of Hypotheses
Data visualization tools enhance hypotheses by confirming, refuting, challenging, or expanding the ideas based on the existing data. Visualization can showcase if the hypotheses are affected by the division of shapes, data outliers, and particular subgroups.
b. Iterative Problem-Solving Processes
You can discover contradictory or unexpected findings to your hypotheses during your iterative problem-solving process through data visualization tools. You test your hypothesis repeatedly until you achieve your desired result. With visualization, you can continually improve your hypothesis.
4. Tools and Software for Visual Problem-Solving
a. ClickUp
ClickUp is a visual problem-solving software that ensures the efficiency of your team’s collaboration. It makes sure that the members of your team are on the same page all the time. A live collaboration tool lets you create or edit documents with your team. It also includes virtual whiteboards to aid you in your problem-solving processes. The whiteboard feature helps your team brainstorm or generate ideas to solve problems you want to address. Mind maps are also available on the site, which lets you identify significant relations, gather useful insights, and execute creative approaches through mapping the connections between datasets and concepts.
b. Hive
Hive is a data visualization tool that provides insightful solutions to your problem-solving processes. With Hive, you can get your team to face difficult challenges and improve their problem-solving abilities. It’s an engaging visual problem-solving platform that makes you see what your team members are doing. Its collaborative work management feature allows you to work with your team to address and solve issues efficiently. It has a user-friendly interface, project hierarchy, Gantt view, and Kanban view, which help you better manage your timelines and progress.
c. Tableau
Tableau is one of the most popular tools for visual problem-solving big companies use. With the platform, you can make several types of maps, graphs, and charts and connect to various sources of data. It efficiently produces visualizations from small-scale to large-scale datasets commonly used for artificial intelligence and machine learning. Tableau is known for its high-quality performance, user-friendly interface, and great data visualization tools.
d. Trello
Trello is a visual problem-solving platform that effortlessly streamlines your work processes by organizing tasks using the drag-and-drop feature. Its collaboration and communication tools let you prioritize tasks and responsibilities efficiently. It has a map that exhibits an overview of your projects so you can see tasks, progress, and dependencies visually. Trello ensures you can solve issues through its effective task-management tools
e. Asana
Last on the list is Asana. It is another well-known visual problem-solving platform that improves your decision-making efficiency. It can be used for several small projects and for teams without complicated workflows. It has a customizable workflow feature aids your team in their unique needs by automating repetitive tasks. It has Kanban boards, Gantt charts, and other data visualization tools used to enhance your problem-solving processes. Lastly, it can be integrated with popular tools like Google Drive, Microsoft, Zoom, etc.
5. Integration with Business Intelligence Systems
a. Leveraging Data for Strategic Decision-Making
Data visualization tools help you leverage data to have strategic decision-making. Visualized data integration allows you to access the data you need making it easier for you to make informed decisions for your business, fueling your business’ competitive intelligence.
b. Real-Time Analytics and Reporting
Real-time analytics and reporting involve gathering live data and sending it to users as it happens. You relay information based on the latest happenings so you or your managers can decide quickly based on the visualized real-time data you reported.
Practical Applications of Visual Problem-Solving
1. Business and Financial Analysis
a. Visualizing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
You can use visual problem-solving in a practical setting by using it for your business and financial analysis. You can apply it by visualizing your Key Performance Indicators or KPIs. To do it, you can simply compare a base value to a target value. You can also use charts and graphs to efficiently present the quantitative nature of your KPIs so you can bring out insightful observations from your team. It simplifies evaluating your project or campaign by clearly seeing the KPIs in place.
b. Forecasting and Trend Analysis
Another way to apply visual problem-solving is to forecast and analyze trends. Using visual tools like line and bar graphs, you see trends over time and draw forecasts from them. You see and build a pattern recognition over time, allowing you to create assumptions that you can use in your next problem-solving sessions. With visual tools, you get the idea of what may happen in the future based on your previous reliable visual data.
2. Scientific Research and Exploration
a. Visualizing Experimental Data
Data visualization plays a significant role in scientific research and exploration. It is applied by visualizing experiments to make them easier for stakeholders to understand. Using graphs, charts and other tools allows stakeholders to efficiently determine issues, identify new trends, and gain insightful information from hard-to-grasp experimental or novel data.
b. Communicating Research Findings Effectively
With visual aids, you also get to communicate your research findings effectively. You can use line graphs to see the changes in trends over time. You can use pie charts to show the percentage of an item from a whole and draw conclusions from them. Visual aids make it easier for you to convey the results of your research to other people.
Best Practices for Visual Problem-Solving
1. Choosing Appropriate Visualization Techniques
To maximize the potential of visual problem-solving, you need to pick the appropriate visualization techniques for your team. You have to ensure that the strategy you employ will help you and make your job easier rather than burden you. By choosing the appropriate data visualization techniques, you can efficiently solve even complex problems with your team. You ensure that your team members are knowledgeable of the strategy so you can reap its full potential.
Consider tools like WebDataRocks, which seamlessly integrate with various charting libraries. This flexibility empowers you to choose the perfect chart type for your data and audience, maximizing the impact of your visualizations.
2. Ensuring Data Accuracy and Integrity
Whatever industry you are in, you must ensure your data’s accuracy and integrity. You have to make sure that all data you present visually are facts and are based on research. You must have evidence to prove and back them up when questions arise. You must double-check all the data present and be 100% sure that they are accurate. This will allow you to provide real information to your team or stakeholders and prevent you from having problems in the future.
3. Encouraging Iterative Exploration and Analysis
You improve by repeating or doing the same thing daily. The same is true for visual problem-solving. You should employ iterative exploration and analysis to ensure that you are constantly improving your decision-making. By exploring and analyzing things continually, you allow continuous adjustment to your project or business process based on the results and feedback you get.
Conclusion
All in all, data visualization truly helps in the decision-making and problem-solving process. It simplifies data and makes them easier to understand for stakeholders. It also enables more engagement from your team and allows them to gain new insights based on the data they see visually. Visual tools and platforms enhance your and your team’s decision-making abilities, providing you with more insightful solutions to solve problems and challenges.
Thank you for the article to Vy, she a content writer for Removal.AI– an AI tool used to remove bg from images for social media, eCommerce, web, app development, and marketing automation. She loves to share her insights about tech, AI, and marketing.
What else to read?
- Data visualization with WebDataRocks & Chart.js: create a dashboard in 5 min
- Navigating the Future of Big Data and Analytics: Trends and Best Practices for 2024
- Tutorial: How to create a dashboard with WebDataRocks and AnyChart
- Top data visualization blogs to follow in 2023
- Pivot Tables: The Ultimate Guide
This is a hyper-competitive era for mobile app development as startups and well-established enterprises are looking to transform their business digitally. Building human-centric custom mobile apps provides them with the ability to offer their services more creatively and conveniently.
Consequently, companies that want to enhance their digital focus with a data-driven app strategy hire a reliable mobile app development company. Their expertise enables the digital transformation of complex and conventional businesses to achieve quantifiable success and ROI.
Do you have a growth-accelerating app idea that you want to convert into a full-functioning mobile application? Read this blog to learn the comprehensive guide on mobile app development, including its process, trends, costs, etc.
What Does it Mean by Mobile App Development?
A mobile application or app is software built to run on a smartphone or tablet. The process of making this software for a mobile app, web app, online app, iPhone app, smartphone app, or hand-held device is called mobile app development.
Based on the nature of the application, this software can be preinstalled on the device (utility app), downloaded from the App Store/Play Store, or accessed via a mobile web browser.
Quality of the app development process and speed-to-market are critical for business success when the competition is at an all-time high. Therefore, the Agile development methodology is widely accepted for mobile app development due to its wide range of benefits, such as pragmatic and comprehensive processes, efficiency, improved quality, adaptability, flexibility, etc.
Mobile App Development: A Market Overview
The number of mobile applications is increasing with every passing year. With 1.8 million apps available on the App Store and 3.7 million Android apps on the Google Play Store, mobile apps are becoming a lucrative business opportunity.
In terms of revenue, Apple iOS is winning the race with $83 billion in revenue generated in 2022 and is expected to generate $125 billion by the end of 2027. Hence, if you are an entrepreneur or own a startup, you can look for a business opportunity in the mobile app market. Moreover, an enterprise can also build an app to expand its revenue stream or benefit from an increased audience.
When we talk about the monetization strategy, premium apps, in-app purchases, and subscriptions are turning out to be some of the most revenue-generating streams. It is forecasted that $233 billion of app spending can be seen by the end of 2026 based on the given monetization methods. Therefore, you must carefully consider your strategy to generate incremental value from your mobile apps.
The number of subscriptions for smartphone mobile networks is increasing rapidly. It is expected to reach 7.7 billion by 2028 when countries like China, India, and the United States are at the top. This states why businesses focus on mobile app development to leverage an extended customer base. Given the stats, it is no wonder mobile apps have such a profound impact on businesses as well as our daily lives.
Top Mobile App Categories Popular in the Market
It is possible that some of you have already come up with a basic idea or concept. Those who are starting from scratch may have no idea where to begin. Competitive analysis is one of the crucial parts of building a successful mobile app. You can take inspiration from the various apps available in the market to find out the features integrated, technology used, monetization methods, etc.
Get inspired by the best mobile app ideas given below:
| App Category | Essential Features and Popular App Examples |
| eLearning App for the EdTech Industry |
|
| On-demand Grocery Delivery App |
|
| eCommerce Mobile App |
|
| On-demand Food Delivery App |
|
| Courier Delivery App |
|
| Healthcare and Fitness App |
|
| Mental Health and Wellness App |
|
| Social Media App |
|
| Cab/Taxi Booking App |
|
| Online Video Streaming App |
|
| Digital Wallet App |
|
Types of Mobile App Development
The types of mobile app development can be typically divided into 3 categories:
- Native App Development: Generally divided into iOS and Android App Development, where the app is built for both mobile platforms separately using their Native app development technologies.
- Hybrid/Cross-platform App Development: Here, the app is built using cross-platform app development frameworks like React Native, Flutter, Ionic, etc. Hybrid apps are also developed using web technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
- Web App Development: Web applications are accessed using mobile web browsers. These types of applications are famous, too, because they ensure that the application developed for the web offers a fast and responsive experience to mobile users.
Step-by-Step Guide to Mobile App Development
Remember that mobile app development is an iterative process, meaning you can move from one or two steps back and forth to generate a quality result.
Here are the steps to build a mobile app:
| Planning | This is the first phase of the app development, which includes requirement gathering. |
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| Designing | In this step, building the UI/UX design of the app is included. |
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| Development | This is the actual building part of the app development process, including coding. |
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| Testing | Here, QA engineers will be checking the quality and performance of the application. |
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| Deployment | After the app is developed and tested, it will be deployed on the App Store/ Play Store or the client-server as per their request. |
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Refine the Mobile App Idea With MVP Development
Do you have an app idea but don’t know whether it will succeed in the market? What if you can launch it in the market with less budget to gauge the response from potential audience or target users?
Minimum Viable Product (MVP) development is an approach to building a software product or, in this case, a mobile app with essential features that represent your core idea or functionalities. This is a launch-ready version of the app; consider it as the first step towards ensuring the success of a mobile app.
Once you get a positive response from the audience and gain enough traction, you can start with the scaling of the application. It minimizes the risk and expenditure before the full-fledged mobile application development.
Tech Stack Used in Mobile App Development
Here are the frameworks, platforms, and technologies used in building mobile applications.
| Android App Development | Swift, Java |
| iOS App Development | Objective-C, Swift |
| Hybrid App Development Framework | React Native, Flutter, Ionic |
| App SDK | Xcode, Android Studio |
| UI Frameworks | UIKit (iOS), Android XML Layouts (Android) |
| Server-side Languages | Node.js, Python, Ruby, Java, etc. |
| Databases | MongoDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL |
| Payment Gateway Integration | Stripe, PayPal, Braintree, and Square |
| Cloud Services | Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud |
| Notifications and Messages | Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM), Apple Push Notification Service (APNs), In-App Messaging (real-time chat), Firebase Realtime, Socket.io |
| GPS Tracking | Core Location (iOS), Google Location Services (Android), Google Maps API |
Top Mobile App Development Service Providers
Here are the top companies providing mobile app development services:
- Successive Digital
It is a CMMI-3 certified next-gen digital solutions provider with over a decade of experience. With their domain expertise on various industry verticals, cloud consulting services, and commitment to delivering value-driven solutions, you can build scalable mobile apps.
- Clutch Ratings: 4.9 (77 Reviews)
- Hourly Rate: $25 – $49 / hr
- Number of Employees: 1,000 – 9,999
- Founded: 2012
- Naked Development
It is one of the most creative app development agencies you can find to hand over your app development project. You can get end-to-end app development solutions from them, including planning, designing, development, testing, and maintenance.
- Clutch Ratings: 4.9 (28 Reviews)
- Hourly Rate: $100 – $149 / hr
- Number of Employees: 10 – 49
- Founded: 2018
- Mercury Development
One of the oldest companies on our list is Mercury Development, making it a reliable source for app development services. From startups to enterprises, it provides its services catering to the needs of a wide variety of business sizes.
- Clutch Ratings: 5.0 (25 Reviews)
- Hourly Rate: $50 – $99 / hr
- Number of Employees: 50 – 249
- Founded: 1999
- CodigoDelSur
It is one of the best-known mobile app development companies with more than 15 years of experience. Moreover, this company has won many awards and accreditations for their exceptional services.
- Clutch Ratings: 4.8 (40 Reviews)
- Hourly Rate: $50 – $99 / hr
- Number of Employees: 50 – 249
- Founded: 2007
- Utility
This specialized company has a team of experienced and skilled professionals crafting custom mobile and web applications. They have experience working with various industry sectors, creating successful applications catering to users’ needs.
- Clutch Ratings: 4.8 (25 reviews)
- Hourly Rate: $100 – $149 / hr
- Number of Employees: 50 – 249
- Founded: 2013
What is the Total Cost of Building a Mobile App?
When you select an app idea and decide to build it, your next concern must be how much mobile app development costs. The total cost of developing a mobile app depends on its complexity— a simple app with basic functionality can cost you anywhere from 30,000 to $60,000. When you increase the complexity, the cost can range anywhere between $60,000 and $150,000. However, an advanced mobile app with a high level of complexity, features, API integration, and ample storage can cost you as much as $300,000 or more.
Other factors influence the mobile app development cost, such as app category, platform selection, app design, app security, testing cost, selected features and functionality, the cost of hiring mobile app developers, and more. Therefore, it is challenging to find out the exact cost of mobile app development. To give you an idea, the average cost of building a mobile app can range from $40,000 to $300,000 (or more as per the complexity).
How to Generate Revenue With Mobile Apps
As a business owner, you must be looking to make it a source of income. Fortunately, there are many methods to generate revenue through your mobile app, and you can select any one of them or use a combination of two or more methods.
- Freemium: This model allows your users to access and utilize your application for free while keeping the selected features paid.
- Subscription Model: You can set the price of the paid subscription tiers with various features and functionalities for your user.
- In-app Purchases: In this type of model, you offer certain services or content to users for a set amount of price. This is one of the widely used revenue models combined with other ones.
- Advertisements: This is a simple trick of monetizing your application by approving ads in your application. However, your application must already be popular and have a set customer base to ensure this revenue stream works for your business.
- Affiliate Marketing: You can offer some affiliate links inside your application via advertisements to earn money. The benefit of this model is that you can negotiate with the brand you are affiliated with on how much commission you want.
- Collaboration With Brands: This model requires you to have marketing skills, as you have to be careful with brand positioning. You can build an app in collaboration with some brands or collaborate with them if you find your application niche.
Conclusion
There’s a lot to unpack regarding mobile app development, including budget, goals, timeline, technical skills, and app complexity. Moreover, it is essential to partner with a reliable and experienced company that you can trust to get custom mobile app development services. Ensure the company you hire has a proven track record of delivering best-in-class mobile apps for a wide range of industry verticals. Moreover, make sure to judge them based on competitive pricing, quality assurance, and maintenance services that can fulfill all your mobile app development needs.
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Data is one of the core components of every business. Data helps to improve the efficiency in problem solving, decision making, generating an ability to function proactively, and focus on sustainability. It is the backbone of customer service, marketing, sales, accounting, etc. Earlier, businesses managed with just static data from spreadsheets and other documents to analyze their performance and suggest relevant improvements. With the innovative technologies like AI, analytics etc, businesses can now transform the static data and use them to optimize customer experiences.
(more…)Are you trying to figure out how to make a profitable mobile application? It entails many difficulties and factors to be considered, such as determining the budget, particular project specifications, features and functionalities, and more. Nonetheless, picking the right combination of powerful tools and technologies is essential to developing an app.
Your mobile app’s budget, performance, and maintenance will all be significantly impacted by the tech stack your mobile app development company decides to incorporate within. This emphasizes choosing the right mix of technologies for efficient app development that gives your company a competitive edge.
There are several factors to consider when choosing the best tech stack. Therefore, you should read this guide to choose the appropriate tech stack for creating your project.
Mobile App Development Tech Stack: 4 Main Pillars
A tech stack, a set of tools and technologies, is decided and arranged as per the development needs of software or an application. These development platforms are strategically used to create well-oriented and feature-rich mobile apps. It can include tools for data storage, security management, user interface design tools, and various other frameworks.
This tech stack is bifurcated into four central pillars to make the mobile app development process seamless, as given below:
In the back-end development of mobile applications, the decision of technologies depends on the smooth functioning of server-side code and the database. The work of backend developers is to store and manage data, respond to user requests, and ensure frictionless communication between the server and client side. The back-end tech stack supports them in controlling these tasks effectively.
| Back-end Development Programming Languages | Python, Ruby, Golang, PHP, or Java |
| Back-end Frameworks | Django, Ruby on Rails, or Laravel |
| Database Management System | MySQL, PostgreSQL, or SQLite |
The front end is at the forefront of any application or software. This is an interface where your users can interact with a digital product. The tech stack chosen to develop the front end of the application manages the user interface and the client-side code running on the device. Developing a mobile app layout includes elements such as buttons, animations, user flow, and links.
| Front-end Development Programming Languages | HTML, CSS, JavaScript |
| Front-end Frameworks | React, Vue.js, and Angular |
Your choice of mobile app development tech stack depends significantly on the platform you choose to deploy the app (such as iOS or Android). Here, all libraries and interfaces are pictured as part of the mobile app design and development. Depending on the mobile app platform, specific technologies are selected.
| iOS Platform | Development Tools: Apple Xcode and AppCode, iOS SDK |
| Programming Languages: Objective-С, Swift | |
| UI Frameworks: SwiftUI, UIKit | |
| Android Platform | Development Tools: Android Studio, Android SDK |
| Programming Languages: Java Kotlin | |
| UI Frameworks: Android UI, Jetpack Compose |
The hosting environment ensures the server-side code runs smoothly on the application as the input-output function depends on it. The fundamental purpose of a hosting platform is to
- store data,
- hosting APIs,
- scale applications,
- implement robust security measures,
- and enhance reliability by minimizing downtime.
Numerous hosting platforms such as Linux, Apache, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are popular choices in mobile app development. However, cloud hosting services have been the most in demand recently due to their many benefits.
How Do I Choose the Best Tech Stack for Creating Mobile Apps?
The robust tech stack you position will influence how effectively you are able to build the app. However, it requires meticulous planning, a clear vision, and familiarity with the features to ensure you have chosen the right tech stack.
The choice of technology stack is also driven by the varying features and levels of complexity of various application categories.
For instance, an app for on-demand meal delivery will provide push alerts, real-time tracking, and smart search and suggestion features. Therefore, you should pick technologies that facilitate easy integration with external parties.
| PHP, Jenkins, LAMP Stack, HHVM, Cassandra, React Native, and GraphQL | |
| Airbnb | JavaScript, React, Java, MySQL, Amazon S3, Amazon EC2, Ruby, Rails, Google Analytics, Braintree, and Twilio |
| Uber | Python, JQuery, Node.js, React, Java Golang, Kafka, Swift, Objective-CMySQL, EC2, and Hadoop |
| Objective-C, Swift, Java, KotlinReact NativeAFNetworking and Facebook SDK | |
| Objective-C, Java, JavaScript, React, ScalaAWS, GCP, and Microsoft Azure |
Note: Remember that these are the primary tech stacks used in developing these apps. An application uses a vast set of technologies for app development. Moreover, technological trends keep changing with time, and thus, companies adopt new tools and frameworks.
The type of platform on which you choose to deliver your application has the most influence on the tech mobile app development stack. As mentioned above, iOS and Android applications will have platform-specific technologies.
In contrast, if you choose to develop a hybrid app, you can use cross-platform frameworks (such as React Native, Ionic, Xamarin, and Flutter).
The next factor you need to consider while selecting a suitable tech stack is the features and functionality you decide to integrate into your mobile app. This is because some technologies are better fit to create or embed features like games, augmented reality, or machine learning.
Make sure to define your budget and resources (time, expertise, and development team) in the initial stage of development. With a fixed budget, you can ensure your team utilizes the tech stack fully within that cost.
For example, native app development can be costly and requires more effort. Whereas hybrid or cross-platform app development can be done with open-source frameworks, ensuring a faster and more cost-effective process.
You must consider whether your application can be scaled with the tool or framework you choose to integrate. Go for the technologies that support a stable system architecture with an increasing user base and traffic. Here, you can select your server, hosting service providers, databases, and programming languages wisely. Ensure they are not getting outdated soon and facilitate app scalability.
Conclusion: Get Experts Help
As mentioned in this article, technologies are growing at an unprecedented rate; thus, it requires the mobile app development company you hire to be updated with the latest tech trends. In conclusion, different types of project requirements, such as budget, app types, technical expertise, and, most importantly, platform choice, affect your choice of tech stack.
Therefore, as you initiate your project with your partnered app development team, begin with a thorough analysis of the app idea and discovery phase. With this, not only will you be able to decide on a robust technology stack but also ensure your mobile app developers are on the same page.