Front-End-as-a-Service is a cloud-based service that allows you to extend your Front End development capabilities with a library of pre-built, feature-rich UI components.
The proliferation of mobile and web apps and the massive digitization of business have now made it more difficult for companies to distinguish their digital solutions from the crowd. The role of an app in business is no longer limited to solving customers’ problems; they need to offer a unique user experience to encourage users to spend more time with the apps.
Considering this fact, several developments have been made to improve content management and enhance the customer experience, for example- headless software architecture/ CMS. The part of the development process that is still untouched is the front end. The front-end is often the most ignored part of the app/website development process.
As the programmers build their first version of a product, they tend to concentrate primarily on the idea and functionality of the app, ignoring the visual elements and convenience, paying less attention to the design and convenience. However, it’s the UX/UI of the product that makes it so popular.
It is the digital storefront, or front end, that is responsible for creating a comprehensive user experience and allowing you to stand out from the competition. Front-end-as-a-Service enables rapid development of MVPs while maintaining high UX/UI standards.
What is Front-end as a service?
In today’s business world, switching from monolithic architectures to micro-services is becoming a viable option. Nowadays, many companies prefer to build their apps using modular blocks that software engineers put together to create a standalone application.
Front-end-as-a-Service is a kind of software component as a service that aims to standardize and streamline the creation of a product’s front end. It relies on cloud-based micro-services. It provides programmers with front-end modules that can be combined into a quick solution with a focus on serviceability. Specifically, it is a development service that consistently creates useful Front-end modules with a user-centric approach.
Why Front-end as a Service (FEaaS) is the Future of Product Development?
The Front-end as a Service (FEaaS) trend is on the rise as platform preferences move away from monolithic ones toward modular ones. A key enabler of modular applications is the decoupling of the frontend and backend. Companies that allow backend functions to be developed independently of their frontends are more likely to be flexible and agile in optimizing customer experiences, according to Gartner. Ideally, they will be able to respond quickly to new touch points that make customer journeys more complex, so that they remain competitive.
To give you a more clear picture, here we are discussing the seven potential advantages of the Front-end-as-a-service approach.
Without further ado let’s dive in:
1. Gives you a Competitive Edge
Competition depends on three major factors- time to market, innovativeness, and quality of the product. If you have a product that is just one of the 100 other variants available in the market, why would the customer opt for your product or service- It should be innovative and creative to stand out among the competitors.
Similarly, if your product is innovative but doesn’t hit the market on time, it also doesn’t make any sense. Lack of quality is not the problem, but the lack of quick deployment. Frontend-as-a-service can liberate you from all this pain. Front end as a service allows you to deploy faster without compromising with the quality, and be creative.
2. Reduces Product Time-to-Market
Creating the front end of the product is a time taking process, which impacts the product’s time to market as well. Front-end-as-a-Service proves to be helpful in this, liberating you from developing each front-end element from the scratch, hence reducing the development time and time to market.
The Gartner auditors estimate that modular technologies like Front-end-as-a-Service (FEaaS) empower companies to add new capabilities 80% faster than their competitors. Front-end as a service allows you to quickly create their apps’ MVPs without sacrificing the UX/UI quality.
3. Implementing User Feedback
Business is about staying as close to your customers as possible – understanding their behavior, preferences, buying patterns, etc. Understanding this will help you deliver a better experience for them. The best way to understand their preferences is to solicit their feedback regularly. Your product’s continued success relies on the constant evolution of your product, on taking the users’ suggestions and feedback into account and working on them.
Customer complaints about a product are almost always related to the user interface. Perhaps something is broken, slow, or unresponsive. There is an obvious answer here: solve the UX problem. However, what if this is something that needs to be shipped right away? Therefore, a front-end-as-a-service provider would make more sense than solving the problem in-house.
4. Offers Pre-Paved Standard Path
Using a Frontend-as-a-Service, along with offering you a pre-paved path to front-end development in the form of a ready-made module, also ensures that all standard functions comply with current industry standards from the outset, which can then be individually optimized.
This makes the front-end development process more efficient, giving companies the peace of mind that their sites are secure and stable. As part of their service level agreements (SLAs), some frontend-as-a-service providers ensure that their users’ websites are always available.
5. Makes Your Frontend Future-Proof
The frontend-as-a-Service future proofs your frontend. This platform, being based on the market standard, proves to be helpful for the developers who are new to the project because they don’t have to study the source code of the home-built solution first and instead can quickly find their way around.
Using pre-built and tested blocks of code, Front-end-as-a-Service software developers create their digital solutions, thus minimizing the number of bugs that can occur in apps. Further, many reliable and trusted vendors offer their own capabilities to embed in the apps that they develop. With front-end-as-a-service, the future is secure, resources are focused in the correct places, and business value can be demonstrated quickly.
6. Saves Resources
In front-end development, Front-End as a Service is a concept that is easy to understand. The platform includes tools and libraries that programmers rely on every day for their work. Therefore, you will not have to train your employees on any special technology or invest additional resources or time into the process, and you will not have to hire any specialists.
Along with this, you are also freed from the heavy burden of creating the basic front-end features from scratch and can utilize the ready-made functionalities from best-of-breed vendors to effortlessly design the most outstanding UI/UX designs.
7. Streamlines the Scalability Process
As customer expectations rise, the bar for the customer experience rises as well. Companies must adapt to these new trends and upgrade their applications. Having a modular approach, Front-end-as-a-Service simplifies the scaling process of an application. Software developers can simply scale up and down the developed apps, depending on the business’s needs or customers’ feedback.
You can delegate or outsource your front-end needs as you work on the back-end of your next iteration so that both are developed simultaneously. By doing so, organizations can better align their apps with the needs of their customers and make them compatible with their current business requirements.
Bottom-line
In a nutshell, Front-End-as-a-Service is a cloud-based service that allows you to extend your Front End development capabilities with a library of pre-built, feature-rich UI components. It takes all the hard work out of front-end design and development and allows you to get right down to the important stuff. This allows you to focus on what matters most, which is your business, and how to take it to the next level. If you are looking for a way to improve your business, please don’t hesitate to contact our experts now.
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