Major Challenges in Web Application Design and Development With Their Solutions

In this dynamic world, technology is continuously evolving to meet the demands of customers. In this scenario, developing user-friendly and highly functional mobile applications is not an easy task. That’s why we have come up with this article to cover all challenges in web application design and development. It will help you to make arrangements beforehand during each phase of application development. Web applications have become one of the most significant technologies that people use every day. People nowadays use different web applications for various activities like online shopping, banking, gaming, communicating, and socializing. As the number of web application users continues to rise, the demand for new technologies also increases. 

The continuous increase and changes in consumer demands have urged companies to opt for website development and launch new applications across various industries. This has caused a surge of available web apps on the market today. The high volume of readily available web apps provides the end-users with more options and flexibility, allowing them to find the right web applications that best fit their needs and preferences. On the other hand, the increasing number of web apps has made the competition stiffer. Below is an image that depicts the rising competition in web applications. 

In order to reach your consumers, improve your businesses, provide a better user experience, and get ahead of the competition, simply building a web application is no longer enough. Rather, you need to think out of the box and build innovative apps with better quality, functionality, and features. However designing and developing a user-friendly, better, innovative, and highly functional web application is not as easy as they seem. When you start developing applications, you will face various challenges in web application design and development. We understand the difficulties that developers and designers experience in building a web application. Thus, we came up with this article.

In this article, we will uncover the most common challenges in web application design and development and the possible solutions you can use to get through such challenges. Knowing these challenges and their solutions beforehand will give you an idea of what hurdles you will likely face during the development process and how you can be more careful to minimize and get over these challenges. But before discussing the challenges in web application design and development, let’s have a quick overview of what a web application is all about first

Quick overview of web applications

A web app (web application) is a software program that uses web browsers and web technology to perform tasks over the internet. Web applications utilize a combination of server-side content (PHP and ASP) and client-side content (JavaScript and HTML). The server-side contents are used to deal with the storage and recovery of the data, while the client-side contents (JavaScript and HTML) are used to introduce data to users. This allows users to collaborate with the organization using web structures, content administration frameworks, shopping baskets, etc. Furthermore, the applications permit employees to collaborate on projects,  share information, create documentation, and work on common documents irrespective of device or location.

Major Challenges in Web Application Design and Development

Assuming that the concept of web applications is clear to you now, let us move on to discuss the major challenges in web application design and development.

1. Challenges during the initial stage

• Technical expertise and experience
• Talent gap of web developers
• Team with incompatible skillset

2. Challenges during planning 

• Defining goals
• Choosing the right frameworks and technologies
• Standardizing the development process

3. Challenges during implementation

• UI/UX design
• Performance and speed
• Security and threats
• Scalability
• Integration
• Balancing features with simplicity
• Future-proof application

Let’s discuss each of the challenges in detail and identify some solutions to cope with them.

Challenges at the initial stage of web application design and development

1. Technical expertise and experience

The technical expertise and experience of developers will decide the quality of the final application and the overall results of the project. Experienced engineers should be able to apply a perfect framework so they won’t need to hand-code the web application from the beginning, thus, allowing them to develop applications more quickly. Hence, depending on the requirement and scope of the project, the developer should technically be an expert in his field so he can execute the application development smoothly.

SOLUTION- Stay up-to-date with the latest technological advancements and innovations. You may also go through your competitors’ sites, observe the latest trends they are using, and try to incorporate them into your application.

2. Talent gap of web developers

With the commencement of the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) in May 2018, organizations have to redefine their goals within their management to make their services and products GDPR-compliant. But however useful it is for customers and individual information, this shift has caused key authorities to adjust themselves and lean more toward consistency and privacy management roles such as that of a chief data officer. This resulted in the dilution of the roles and responsibilities of Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) and Chief Information Officers (CIOs). According to the 2019 Cyberthreat Defense Report by CyberEdge, almost 80% of companies are reported to have been left unattended.  This, in return, has left the developers working without proper guidance from the right authorities, causing them confusion during application development.

SOLUTIONS – 

• Only store the data that you will need in the future and protect the said stored data.
• Subject access and erase request- make it easier to delete, retrieve or anonymize data whenever needed.
• Get a reasonable assent before you speak with clients and maintain a preference management page.
• Allow users to opt out of profiling.

Disclaimer: We are giving general solutions based on our experience only and not based on legal grounds.

3. Team with incompatible skillset

“I believe that leaders and leadership teams working together in a proper design will run the business more effectively than by hierarchical, command-and-control. But I can’t prove that. And there are no models.” – Marvin Bower 

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A good team is a blend of skills, industry benchmark specialists, and professionals who can understand requirements and deliver the best solutions. Developing a web application requires a team effort. Note that the team is not only composed of expert developers but also of various professionals with unique skill sets. Your team may include professionals from the development department, marketing department, design department, or other departments. One of the most common problems that companies face is having a diverse team with insufficient knowledge about web application development or about what professionals from other departments do.  Lack of knowledge may result in disagreements or issues among team members. For instance, a team member from the marketing department who has insufficient knowledge about building web applications may set unrealistic deadlines for the development or design, which may cause the developers and designers to be caught in a tight spot where instead of ensuring quality, they will expedite the process to catch up with the deadline.  

SOLUTION-  The best solution to this problem is to always maintain open and constant communication between team members. You don’t have to form a team with members who are all experts in web design and development. Though, knowing helps a lot. All you need is to ensure that everything about the project is well communicated among the team and the task timeline is always in sync with the project’s goals. It also helps to assign an efficient project manager who is also a good communicator.

Challenges during the planning of web application design and development

1. Defining goals

   “If you define the problem correctly, you almost have the solution.” ​–​ Steve Jobs

Goals are like a roadmap and a blueprint that will guide you in designing and developing a web application. They will help you keep your priorities and focus aligned. Goals will also help you measure the success rate of your project. Properly defining your goals will also ensure that everything is on the right track.  Various other challenges in web application design and development that we’ll discuss later, like application execution and speed, solely depend on settling on intelligent decisions during the planning stage. Everything begins with your vision for your application. That influences all that follows. Along with that, different domains have different app requirements.

For example, a health or fitness app requirement is entirely different from an enterprise-level collaborative app. Hence first understand the business need and deed, then set goals for a web application. Working on a web design and development project without a clear goal is just like driving without an exact destination. You know you’ll need to drive, but you don’t know where to go. As a result, you may end up in a location you least want, or perhaps you remain driving around the city for hours until you exhaust your energy. The same thing is true with web design and development. Simply designing and developing a web application without knowing what you want to build or achieve will only lead you to a meaningless end-point. Thus, you should always start your web design and development project by defining your goals. 

SOLUTION – To define your goals, you’ll have to ask yourself a few questions. Below are some of the relevant questions that can help you clearly define your goals. 

• Why do you want to build a web application?
• What kind of web application do you want to develop?
• Who are your target users?
• What your target users are looking for in a web application similar to what you are planning to build?
• What features and functionalities do you want your web application to have?

The success of your web app design and development project depends on how clearly you define your goals. It also greatly impacts how you will handle and address the other challenges you may face while building your web app. 

2. Choosing the right tech stack

The tech stack is a toolset or a set of technologies that you can use in designing and developing a web application. This set of technologies includes frameworks, platforms, servers, software, programming languages, and other relevant tools essential for web app design and development. Your tech stack will affect everything about your web app project. It can either make your web application project succeed or fail. Choosing the right set of technologies will give you better chances at attaining your project’s goal and building the web app you desire. The overwhelming number of web app design and development technologies available on the market today provide developers with a wide array of options to choose from. Unfortunately, this large number of choices also makes it more puzzling for developers to pick the right ones. The challenge now is how to choose the technologies you will use for your project.

SOLUTION- The best solution to this challenge is to identify your needs. It can be tempting to use the most popular and the latest technologies but remember being popular doesn’t always mean that such technologies will work for all. Web applications are different from each other in one way or another, especially in terms of functionalities, features, and tech stack needs. The tech stack needed for an interactive chat app, for instance, maybe more complex than that for a simple cooking or fitness web application. By defining your goals and knowing your needs, you can be able to choose the right tech stack for your web application. 

3. Standardising development process

“The major development challenges faced by businesses during web application development is standardizing development processes.”     – David Pawlan                                                                    

If you ask 5 developers to create an application, you might get 5 different approaches. These 5 approaches may meet the requirements, but they’re made using different processes.  At a higher level, standardizing development processes means building a development strategy that is aligned with your business goals and priorities. This development strategy can help you predict development experience. Sadly, the lack of standard development processes is a challenge for most businesses, which results in far more complex and time-consuming maintenance.

SOLUTION- The modern dev processes must have a standard approach that can be consistent and easy to maintain. All developers must work the same way, and the process should be understandable and predictable.

Challenges during the Implementation of web application design and development

1. UI/UX Design

“Almost 50% of all organizations say further developing client experience, and consumer loyalty was the main impact to begin a digital transformation.”     –PWC

User experience(UI & UX ) tells the user’s perception, reaction, and feeling while engaging in your application. Therefore, defining the impression you want to leave on your user through your web application is crucial before deciding how to build it. Those days were gone when mobile devices were not readily feasible, so web design was relatively simpler. But today, web applications are made more responsive and advanced, allowing users to browse them through various devices like laptops, smartphones, tablets, etc. If users find the web design complicated or confusing, they will not stay on the web page and bounce it.

SOLUTION- Make sure to focus on the below-given components when designing your web applications in order to achieve intuitive UI/UX design.

• Clear navigation
• Easy-to-read typography
• Engaging visuals
• Consistent design across all web pages
• Minimal steps for a task (ex filling form, etc.)

2. Performance & Speed

 “Speed is certainly a positioning element. Indeed.”   -John Mueller, Google

Performance and speed are significant challenges in web application design and development, so they should be considered during each development phase. In today’s fast-paced world, time is the biggest constraint. That’s why no one likes slow-loading sites. Hence make sure that your application has a great speed and performance so that users can browse it completely in less time. Let’s see how you can improve the speed and performance of your web applications.

SOLUTION– Try to implement the given below points to get a high-performing robust application. 

• If your application has a lot of content, make sure that they are optimized properly. 
• For great performance, the developers should avoid poor performance issues during the development phase, such as unoptimized databases, poorly written codes, and traffic spikes.
• Instead of doing damage control, it is better to be careful from the beginning. For that, either hire a web development company to get custom software development services or convey your expectations of the app to your in-house team in the beginning only.

3. Security & Threats

With increasing cyber threats, keeping the app secure should be at the top of the priority list of product managers. Web security is a vital task that should not be left unattended until the last phase of the SDLC (software development life-cycle) in order to avoid any scope for security threats at all stages of application development. If your website deals with crucial customer information like confidential data, payment details, or contact information, always make sure that security measures must be applied to guarantee security guidelines prerequisites are met and ensure that clients can securely carry out online transactions. Check out the stats below to understand how important are security and threat factors to consider while developing web applications.

Websites by maximum severity of threats

Image source

Average Number of Threats Per Application

Threats of Various Severity Level

    Image source

After going through these stats, we are sure that you will place security and threats in your priority list during web application development. Now let’s see the most common vulnerabilities. 

                                                                    Top Ten Threats (Percentage in Web Application)

SOLUTION- Some of the  important practices you can implement  to avoid threats in your application are:

• SSL certificates are one of the standard practices that allow encrypted communication between servers and web browsers.
• Developers must ensure to employ the security measures right from the beginning and keep them updated as the application grows.
• Right coding should be done to protect web applications from cyberattacks. 
• During the development of web applications, always secure user data safety, database malfunctioning, denial of service attacks, and illegal access to restricted parts of the website.

4.  Scalability 

An application can utilize accessible assets to expand or diminish the capacity of the system. Regarding business, web application scalability helps keep up with clients while simultaneously acquiring new ones. However, scalability has nothing to do with the bandwidth and proper use of computers, nor about performance. Rather it’s about balancing the load on the server. Hence, when the traffic increases, you have to add more servers to balance it. It means that your application should be scalable enough to be able to serve all the customers simultaneously. 

 SOLUTION-  Cover the below points to get a scalable application.

• Cloud computing helps maintain product scalability.
• Make sure not to throw loads on a single server.
• SOA (Service-oriented architecture) can help make the application scalable.
• Design software that can run on a server.

5. Integration

“A Key challenge for application developers is  dealing with the intricacy of incorporating multiple systems with numerous business capacities and being able to convey those expenses successfully, within the budget and pre-decided time frame.”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      – Oren Greenberg

Today’s enterprise applications are more diversified, and modern businesses now use in-house BI tools, SaaS-based CRM systems and host their website on the cloud. However, it provides more flexibility, but it comes with challenges too. The biggest challenge is how do you tie everything together. For a web developer, the challenge in web application design and development is to incorporate every feature into the web application and create an application that integrates with other web applications. 

 SOLUTION- To overcome this challenge, create more native applications and integrate them with other applications. 

6. Balancing Features with simplicity

The increased user expectation for mobile applications has made developers’ lives tricky. As to remain in the competition, they have to develop more feature-rich applications. If the application doesn’t meet the user expectation, they will switch to another application. Hence make sure to design your application considering all the needs of users. We can say that building applications that meet your user’s higher requirements is one of the biggest challenges.

SOLUTION- To achieve a highly competitive application, answer these two questions before starting your project.

• For whom you are developing?– Knowing your audience before development helps in meeting the user requirements to a higher level. 
• How can they use it?– Along with knowing your audience, it is also essential to know their goals. It means how they are going to use this application.

 Answer these questions and keep in mind throughout the app development that you are working with user’s and for the users. Also, timely update your application based on user feedback.

7. Future-proof application

While developing web applications, always ensure that you provide solutions, not for today but the future. User demand and technology are changing at a fast pace. Hence your application could be such that it can be easily updated and incorporate changes based on user needs and feedback. In order to accomplish it, do consider the given points while developing web apps.

• What your application looks like in the next few years?
• How many users will be using your application in the next two years?
• How will web standards evolve?
• What will be the next big trend in application development?

You should make web applications that meet your current and future requirements without knowing what those will be. Hence focus on all the above points, as no business wants applications out of date in a couple of years.

SOLUTION– Some helpful tips to get future rich applications are:

• Choose a proven tech-stack- Trying new technology and tools is good in one sense, but use them for your business application development only after they are established.
• Create an application for growth– Design an application that can support more users than expected and accordingly switch the database and servers. 
• Option for an add-on- Design and develop web application in such a way that in future, if you want to add any new feature or want to change the look and feel, you don’t have to change the whole application.

Challenges after launching of web application design and development

When a site has been dispatched or even prepared to dispatch, other challenges emerge. Developers need to oblige a ton of things that a customer will need in the future because there will consistently be issues with the live form, even after careful testing. For example, spammers may pursue client accounts that developers need to oversee in the customers’ interest to ensure that the site’s functionality isn’t influenced. Continuous maintenance and support are the prime need of any application to remain live in users’ eyes. Building a robust and scalable application is incredible, but your application is relevant until the next algorithm release without proper support and maintenance. 

SOLUTION– Timely support and maintenance considering the user’s feedback in the account is the key success of any web application in the long run.

Tips to minimize the challenges in  web application design and development

• Strategic planning will moderate your most complex advancement challenges. Put out business objectives. Then make sure all that follows is in support of them.
• A web application is a mix of design elements and building elements. Make sure to have a balanced application. You can’t overcome a bad build with a great design and vice versa.
• Always keep in mind your targeted audience, as only then you will be successful in delivering applications meeting user expectations.

Final Words

We all know that challenges are a part of life, but learning challenges before moving forward will help to ease down your journey. This is true for web development as well.  Now we believe you know all the possible challenges in web application design and development, and you are clear on how to overcome them with the provided solutions. So go ahead and begin your web development journey; feel free to reach out to us if you are stuck somewhere.