Until recently, business leaders only had two choices when they wanted to create made-to-order user experiences for cloud apps:
- Use the basic code-free tools provided by their platform vendor, or
- Write expensive, time-consuming custom code.
Basic tools deliver basic customizations. With most no-code user interface (UI) tools, you can add a field, list, or component like a rudimentary chart, list or button. But if you want to achieve anything above and beyond, basic tools fall short. For example, you may want to:
- Create your own navigation and sub-navigation.
- Style your apps and portals to match your own brand.
- Adapt your screens to map to your own processes.
- Mash-up data from different apps and platforms in a seamless user experience (UX).
What is the code chasm?
You stand at the edge of what you can accomplish with basic code-free tools and examine the chasm that separates you from your ideal user experience. You look over the edge of that cliff and wonder, “Is it worth writing custom code to resolve this pain?”
Traditionally, getting beyond basic functionality has meant leaping into this “code chasm.”With a lot of time and money, custom code may deliver a branded, process-driven user experiences. But in the end, code locks you into a different kind of box. To make even the smallest change, you must pay even more money and wait for the changes to be implemented.
Custom code is not future-proof. As your underlying cloud platform naturally evolves (a good thing), custom code can break. What seemed like a simple user interface project can end up costing hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to maintain and adapt. The code chasm can be a bottomless money pit.
Walking the plank: A brief history of CRM UX tools
The most innovative cloud platforms acknowledge the code chasm and do something about it. Over the last decade, CRM giants introduced different code-free user experience solutions.
These efforts narrow the code chasm. But expectations quickly shift. One taste of customizability left customers wanting more. In the face of these new expectations, the new tools quickly began to feel less like a bridge over the code chasm and more like walking a plank.
Customers were left with the same old options: either stick with the limited code-free tools or make the leap into a bottomless pit of custom coding.
Trade your plank for a bridge
We know from history that incremental shifts rarely lead to revolutionary changes. Though the new UX tools from CRM companies extend the code-free plank, they don’t yet deliver the complete, code-free bridge to help enterprises safely cross the code chasm.Soon after newly announced UX tools become generally available, you may encounter limitations.
For some, these limitations will serve as welcome boundaries. A small business just starting out with sales apps probably wants some initial UX boundaries. But veteran platform users and larger, innovative enterprises may feel constricted by the limitations of both the current and new UX tools.
They may also be impatient, reluctant to wait for what may come in the future.To evaluate coming announcements, ask some tough questions. For example, will the new UX tools enable you to:
- Gain complete navigation control of your apps, portals and sites, without code?
- Style every app, page, portal and component according to your brand, without code?
- Integrate read/write data from other apps and platforms into your UX, without code?
- Mold the entire interface to your unique business processes, without code?
- Deploy a unique UX to each business unit and customer type, without code?
You can use the answers to these questions to measure just how short the plank may be, and how quickly you may fall into the code chasm, yet again. With Skuid, the answer to each of those questions is a resounding “yes!”
Bespoke UX requires an infinitely flexible, scalable, and extensible bridge to span the code chasm, not a plank. Skuid is that revolutionary code-free bridge to a made-to-order UX future. Nothing else comes close.
It’s no wonder so many enterprises have moved to Skuid. If you have any lingering doubts, see how our customers are driving results with Skuid.
