How we Develop Digital Assets into Functional Apps

What is a Digital Asset?

A digital asset is content which can be distributed across a wide range of media. That could be social media platforms, blogs, 3rd party websites, or business apps. Because digital assets are non-physical, they pose a unique business challenge. This is where Digital Asset Management becomes necessary, even for small business owners. Most developers generate and use digital assets on a daily basis. Even so, digital documents are distributed in a disorderly manner. This harms communication between different teams in organizations.

Key Questions:

1. When you need a digital asset, how do you find it?

2. How do you keep track of how a digital asset has been used?

3. When you find a certain digital asset, how do you verify copyright ownership and other possible restrictions?

4. Has this asset been used before?

5. Do you have permission to use this asset?

These are the critical questions developers need to be answered to do their job. This is why creating functional digital assets starts with effective Digital Asset Management.

DAM offers an efficient way to centralize, manage, and share digital assets. Especially when coordinating the online accounts of your company. It provides a single location where people can find the digital assets of your business.

Digital Asset Management

DAM is an umbrella term with broad meaning. Most solutions to the problem of managing digital assets share the following core features:

1. Storage: How are your digital assets used, stored, and backed-up?

2. Retrieval: How are your digital assets accessed? This is the most important component and typically involves a search based on pre-defined metadata. If you have a lot of digital assets, then it will be necessary to build a taxonomy. This will help to keep storage consistent. Which in turn ensures the functionality of your digital assets.

3. Delivery: How are digital assets from your brand delivered to the appropriate people? Of course, you want the digital assets that you’ve created to be usable. Then build a DAM solution that facilitates the distribution of your digital assets.

Why Manage Digital Assets?

Avoid Digital Clutter

Having a lot of digital information shouldn’t be a problem. It means your organization is productive. The issue arises when it becomes clutter and gets out of control. When this happens it slows down the development of your app, duplicates work, and blocks collaboration. These combine to cause frustration to clients. Digital clutter makes it difficult for us to convert your digital assets into a great app.

Improve Collaboration

As digital assets are created they have a tendency to get lost. This makes it very difficult for developers to manage files as we will be working in at least two different locations. Our offices and your offices. This is especially true if we are building a complex app with a lot of features. In which case we would be working with a large number of files over the course of many months.

There are many locations your digital assets could be hiding. They could be dispersed across local drives and cloud storage. In many organizations, the digital asset library tends to be disorganized. This is why during the mockup phase we also introduce a digital asset management system to ensure that our developers always have access to the files they need to build your app.

Digital Asset Management for App Development

Digital asset management has undergone a rapid evolution in recent years. It started as a rather arcane tool for archive management. It was used by television studios, magazines, and libraries. Now it has become a key part of organizational collaboration. App developers see DAM as an important part of their strategy. There are four key reasons for this:

1. The proper management of digital assets cuts developments costs by saving time. DAM allows development teams to leverage digital assets across a wide range of communication and distribution channels. This, in turn, allows them to create apps that have more client input without sacrificing deadlines.

2. It helps developers to reduce the total cost of creating and updating the app by allowing them to repurpose and reuse certain digital assets.

3. As projects grow in size, collaboration becomes more difficult. A well-structured DAM allows everyone to collaborate better. This happens by improving workflows so that decisions about digital assets can be taken in parallel and directed at the proper people.

4. Some of our clients operate under strict regulation. DAM allows us to ensure they are always in compliance with current legal standards. It also allows us to ensure audit trails are maintained.

How we Develop Digital Assets

New employees need to know how to create digital assets. They should learn an effective organization process. Avoid digital clutter before it starts. Ensure that your assets are in a centralized location where everyone can access them.

Remote Creativity

Modern employees work in a broad range of locations. They may be at home or in a coffee shop more often than the main office. We must ensure that work is available to other colleagues no matter where they decide to work.

If there is no central location then when you create digital assets they will be difficult for other team members to find. In fact, assets may be lost as employees leave an organization. A lack of centralization hinders collaboration. Making it more difficult to maintain a consistent brand.

The key to getting your digital assets organized starts with an efficient workflow. Your solution should allow employees to organize and store digital assets easily. But, it should also allow them to quickly find and retrieve the assets they need.

From Disorderly Assets to Killer Apps

Here are the steps we take to develop your digital assets into a functional app:

1. We gather your files together. We ensure that your custom app contains everything you need. This means gathering the digital assets you currently have. Usually, your current assets are distributed haphazardly. Spread across several hard drives, cloud accounts, and external storage media.

2. Begin cataloging files. This is where we begin to list, import and store the digital assets that we will use. These will be kept in a location that provides the easiest accessibility for our developers as well as your employees. The location will depend on the size of your organization. SMEs can store their assets on a single centralized server. Larger businesses will usually opt for many servers synchronized across a global network.

3. Organize your metadata. Some of your digital assets already have metadata added automatically. For instance, digital images are often tagged with contextual information. This is usually not enough. In this case, we add more metadata manually. This metadata allows our developers to find relevant files more easily. This is why we take the time to include as much metadata as possible when creating digital assets.

4. File management. Not every member of the development team will have the right to use every digital asset. Proper handling of digital assets and the metadata attached to them will protect your organization from falling afoul of copyright rules. We ensure that any necessary licensing information is included in the working files to guarantee the final app does not violate any copyrights.

5. We protect your originals. We let you know ahead of time how we may want to utilize various digital assets to create your app. Our DAM systems are very flexible regarding how files can be transmitted. What is important is ensuring your original files remain safely on your server. Only copies will be distributed.

6. Archive. We treat the digital assets developed for your brand like any other piece of intellectual property. We maintain regular backups in an archive that is separate from the active development server.

Test and Verify

At this point, we have successfully developed your digital assets into a prototype app. It is now time to test your app to ensure it meets your organization’s standards. Bring in a group of testers to check whether your prototype app is configured properly. Before you do, here are a few things to keep in mind:

1. Remember what you want your app to achieve. Then set functional goals.

2. Create test tasks. Define which tasks your testers will need to complete based on the objectives you have in mind for the app.

3. Select the right people to test the prototype. During our collaborative meetings and workshops, we will have nailed down your ideal user. These are the people who should now be your app testers.

4. Consider employing a usability testing tool. Tools like Koncept App allow you to test our prototype with real users and get a personalized picture of their individual behavior.

5. Keep track of your most important usability metrics:

• Average completion steps
• Average completion time
• Success rate