Please introduce your company and give a brief about your role within the company?
Big Pixel is a strategically focused software design and development firm. This means we create custom software to help businesses enter new markets or create new solutions for existing markets.
Practically speaking, we build web and mobile apps for large and small organizations. Our passion is building systems that are beautiful, scalable, and, above all, usable.
I am David Baxter, Chief Pixel. I founded the company in 2013 as a one-man-band. Over the years, we have grown, and my role has changed from “do-it-all” to client management, sales, and team development.
What was the idea behind starting this organization?
I started Big Pixel to create a new kind of software development company. I had been designing and developing software for over 12 years by then, and I had seen firsthand how many software companies were built on smoke and mirrors rather than transparency and openness. Big Pixel was designed from the ground up to do business a bit differently.
Big Pixel was also created to combine my passion for design with my development background. This means that design is the cornerstone of what we do rather than an added service.
What are your company’s business model–in house team or third party vendors/ outsourcing?
We are a mix of both, actually. We have some developers in-house, but we often use contractors to meet the needs of our clients. We have a firm US-based policy for all our work. This means that we do not offshore any of our design or development.
How is your business model beneficial from a value addition perspective to the clients compared to other companies' models?
Even though we are a small company, we provide the services of a much larger one because of our unique structure. For instance, most smaller development firms do not have a dedicated testing team or project managers on every project, but we know from experience that having these dedicated resources improves every deliverable we give to our clients.
Also, over 90% of our projects are fixed fees rather than hourly. This goes back to our core value of transparency. When you bill it hourly, by default, that puts you and your client on an adversarial plane. They are never 100% sure if you are dragging your feet for those extra few hours. With a fixed fee, that is never an issue.
What industries do you generally cater to? Are your customers repetitive? If yes, what ratio of clients has been repetitive to you?
We love to build and design new things. As such, we aim to work across a wide variety of industries. We have built everything from medical software to education, entertainment, and corporate systems.
Almost all our clients come back to us for multiple phases. In fact, most of our current clients have been with us for over two years, and some we have had since we were founded.
Mention the parameters which are most important for you in developing an app design.
The key to a good mobile app is its simplicity. The user-experience of a mobile app should be created in a way that they can get to where they want to be and finish what they want to do as fast as possible. Mobile, by its very nature, is quick, and users want to get in and out quickly.
We work with our clients to help them recognize what features a user will look for in a mobile app versus a web app. For instance, on an ecommerce site, a customer might browse and look around at a wide variety of goods; however, if the customer is visiting that same site on the phone they are most likely going to go right for the search functions, so they can find what they want and check out faster.
What key aspects do you keep in mind while developing an app design in order to enhance its usability?
Usability is all about putting yourself in the “user’s shoes”. Why are they coming to the site? What is their goal? Creating a clear path to the user’s goals is key to good user-experience. Being beautiful doesn’t hurt either. 😊
What are the key parameters to be considered before selecting the right framework for a app design?
When we select a framework, we ask a few questions:
- Is it a popular framework? We do not want to be out on the bleeding edge, where it is tough for our clients to find developers in the “proverbial bus” scenario. It is important to stay current without “outrunning stack overflow”.
- Is it easy to build with? We prefer frameworks that provide a common structure rather than are completely open. For instance, React, and Angular apps often look fairly similar from one app to the next. This speeds up development time considerably.
- Is it around for the long term? Our clients need something that is solid, dependable, and maintainable over a long period of time. We want to make sure we are always building with platforms that will be well-maintained for the foreseeable future.
Which framework do you suggest your clients to go for when they approach you with an idea? Why?
Our clients usually fall into two camps: Startup or Corporate.
Our startup clients are usually more flexible with the framework we use. Often, we select React/Angular for the frontend with a Node JS API backend. This allows us to build a highly scalable and maintainable application that has wide developer support.
Most of our corporate clients are married to Microsoft on the backend. They have SQL Server databases and are often using Azure services. The best way to integrate into those platforms is with a .Net (C#) API with a sleek React/Angular frontend.
Android or iOS— which framework is best to use to build your app design? What are your recommendations?
We recommend that clients go for a hybrid web platform over going full native. React Native or Ionic are generally better platforms for most applications (at least in the beginning) because you can work on both platforms for roughly the same cost of building a native app on a single platform.
What are the key factors that you consider before deciding the cost of a mobile app design?
The cost of an app generally comes down to the following:
- Complexity: More screens mean more expensive. Recurring payments are more expensive than single payments. Mobile is more expensive than the web. Simply put, the more complicated the app is, the more it will cost.
- Design: Highly designed apps cost more than something from a template. All our apps are custom-designed, but if you have a lot of animation or slick transitions, this will add to the cost of the app.
- Scalability: We always build with scale in mind, but it is all about the target size. If you expect that 1,000 people will ever use your app, then we will build the architecture differently than someone who is aiming for millions of users.
What kind of payment structure do you follow to bill your clients? Is it Pay per Feature, Fixed Cost, Pay per Milestone (could be in phases, months, versions etc.)
We build based on sprints. Sprints are an all-inclusive block of features. For us, a standard sprint is three weeks and includes:
- 60 hours of Development
- 20 hours of Project Management
- 20 hours of QA/Testing
- 10 hours of Architecture and Design
Delivering in sprints allows us to consistently give our clients high-quality code that has been designed, tested, and managed.
Do you take in projects which meet your basic budget requirement? If yes, what is the minimum requirement? If no, on what minimum budget you have worked for?
We do not have a minimum per se, but almost all our projects are at least a sprint.
What is the price range (min and max) of the projects that you catered to in 2019?
Our projects ranged from $30,000 to over $300,000.
