Things To Know Before Designing An App

With the number of mobile applications soaring high since its inception, there are all the chances that your app might just go unnoticed. Building a mobile app is not just about getting things done by your developers.

Mobile apps, just like any other business process must be organized, strategized, and designed to solve the purpose of end-users.

Before you jump into the decision of creating a mobile app, it is imperative to gauge its results in advance. And to do that, it is best to consider a few of these points before indulging into the entire process of mobile app development..

1. Should you develop an application?

The advancements in the development environment that delivers a state of art mobile platforms make headlines every year. What we seem to take for granted is just how powerful and flexible a mobile identity platform is nowadays.

Apart from this, you need to think about some important questions such as whether an app brings more revenue? How will be helpful to you in serving your long term business goals? Make sure you ask all the hard questions before investing your time and resources in creating the app.

2. Choosing the right platform

The level headed discussion on choosing the best platform for your application can be entirely befuddling. However, when settling on the choice amongst Android, iOS, React Native, Windows and think of a holistic UI that you can deliver specifically to your application. Also, you can choose from hybrid development or native development as per your business requirements.

Selecting a suitable mobile application development is extremely important for its success. If you want to match your pace with this exponential app development market growth then you need to pick the best platform for your app.

If you want your app to operate only on a specific operating system such as iOS, Android, or web, then you can go for native application development.

Hybrid App

With multi platform web technologies such as HTML5, CSS and Javascript. In addition to this, Hybrid Apps are easy to develop and have fast accessibility.

If you are aimed at interactivity, regular usage and offline compatibility, then a hybrid app may suit your preferences. It delivers attractive advantages both the native app and the web app development approaches.

Native App

Native apps are especially designed for a single mobile operating system. It cannot work across each and every device. For example, Android apps are developed using either JAVA or Kotlin. While Objective C or Swift is used for developing apps for iPhone and iPad.

This choice won't just influence the developers; it altogether affects the scope and flexibility of an app. The required coding that goes into the making of a mobile app will moreover decide the utility and adaptability of your app's offerings.

3. Conduct market research

Before doing any task, it is always advisable to do R&D. Building an App is no different, conducting in-depth market research helps you to obtain valuable insights into the current market scenario and competitors.

It helps you to understand about various strategies used and mistakes made by your rivals. You can learn from those errors and come up with a better plan. Ensure that you involve users' review in your research. Ask your target audience what they want; evaluate the real demand and take all the necessary decisions to suffice them.

4. What Are the Opportunities?

Developing a cutting-edge mobile app comes with a lot of benefits for a business owner. A mobile app lets you integrate multiple strategies to attract your customers that will eventually increase your revenues. Moreover, mobile apps offer better accessibility and great simplicity via their user interface.

Besides this, mobile apps are a great tool to reduce your marketing costs. It can be used to market new products, inform about offers and re-invite users to increase the activity of the app. Apart from this, it takes minimal time, is low cost and comprises a wider audience reach at the same time.

5. Understand your users

Building an App without knowing your target audience is like firing a shot in the dark. It is essential to know your customers' need as your app's success would purely depend on it. Your App won't make its way to the user's phone if it doesn't solve their problem or add value.

User feedback always helps; take feedbacks and opinions from customers and know what they are looking for. Align your objectives with your users' demands, and there would be nothing that would stop your app. In this way, you can get more app installs.

6. Choose the right app development company

The idea of the App is solely yours, you can build your app designs on your own by using different app builders such as ColdFusion Builder, Appy Pie, Apple store connect or Interface Builder, or based on an entirely new data model.

The App Builder contains low-level coding, high productivity integrated mobile app development environment where you can develop applications as per your preferred user interaction.

However, the execution is dependent on the App Development Company you choose. A mobile app development company plays a significant role in making your App user-friendly, aesthetic and intuitive.

You must check and clarify all the important below point before choosing a development company:

• Check all the technologies, coding skills and app making process
• Read their Case Studies to get an idea of the types of apps delivered by company.
• Contact Companies they have previously worked with
• Keep in mind the Time-Zone for effective communication

It is imperative that your developer has a sound knowledge of delivering excellent app designs to provide the best user experience. Your developer must consider the usability of a relevant graphic design that suits your app.

The mobile app developers must build the app in such a way that the user can perform its designated functions without any assistance.

7. Justify your reason for developing an app

It may appear like the least demanding inquiry to answer. However, as you are required to brief developers about your app, you at first place must articulate the specific purpose.

Source: Forrester Research, February 2013 "2013 Mobile Trends For eBusiness Professionals"

Defining dissimilarities between the website and app offerings is important. There must be a strategic clarity on how distinctively will you offer the services through an app than the website.

It is critical to have a keen vision to make an app. Additionally, it must be in alignment with the business objectives and the way how the app will accomplish the same.

8. Build a minimum viable app

It is essential to test your application on target devices before it is out in the market. MVP is a version of your app which only consists of the most crucial features.

MVP is a must as it answers so many significant questions as below:

• What problem does your app solve?
• What process your users will use to solve the problem?
• What's that thing which makes your app a must have?
• Which is the most significant feature in your app?
• Which are the features you must have in your app?
• Which features should you prioritize?

MVPs are much like beta testers that lets you introspect your app in a nutshell. It allows you to understand the essence of the app in a precise manner.

9. Performance

After building the app's MVP, it's time to measure the performance. This has become crucial than ever. When you monitor the right metrics for the performance of your mobile app, you can eliminate any serious issues within it. Because of this, you can ensure that your app works smoothly on any mobile device.

To measure an app's performance, you need to consider various parameters, such as user engagement KPIs, UI/UX, user growth rate, app store optimization, organic conversion rate, etc. Apart from this, you also need to consider your app's ranking in the Google play store or Apple app store to track its performance at a specific period in time.

10. Security measures

After tracking your app's performance, you need to decide the security measures in case you have such a mobile app that needs sensitive data from a non-technical user to operate. It also comprises the information that needs to be collected and the way it is used.

Mobile app security became an extremely important thing that couldn't get easily neglected. Moreover, your real users data is the most valuable asset. So, ensure that you have the processes in place to collect, handle and store the real user data, as well as to manage any potential security risks.

11. Determine the ways to earn from an app

Before building a mobile app, you must find out ways to monetize your application. There are few strategies like private advertisements inside your application to start earning on pay per click or pay per view basis.

You also need to determine whether you will be charging users for download or integrate in-app purchase strategy. You can always go for a freemium option on initial grounds.

Free banner ad services are prebuilt effectively into each template that starts naturally once the application achieves 1000 installations. Now you may include your advertisement code into the application, and can roll on to earn through affiliate advertising.

12. Determining cost of developing an app

Plenty of factors contributes to determining the cost of developing a mobile app. These factors must be precisely analyzed before setting up the budgetary boundaries.

Apart from the crucial element of establishing the platform which we already discussed above, there are other sub-elements which require you to take certain strategically-aligned decisions.

• Decide if users are required to login. Here you need to make a crucial decision of integrating login with the social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter.
• Precisely put down the norms if users are to create a personal profile within an app. In this case, users will enter information into an agreement of public viewing.
• If you plan to blend an app with your website, then it certainly requires making an API (Application Programming Interface). This is the way how all your friendly apps talk to each other.
• Determining on the design standards for mobile apps is as important as its utility.

Your apps can just be bare-bones or stock, or you can further scale it up and make it appear beautiful enough for your users to enhance their UX.

These factors can be broken down into various stages of mobile app development, and each one carries a cost. The graph below reflects the app development cost-breakup during each of these stages

Technically, the cost of app development is based out of hourly rates. These rates vary from company to company, and even geographical location plays a pivotal role in fixing the cost of developing a mobile app.

The industry standards for developing a mobile app at major markets are as follows;

• The US and Canadian-based companies charge from $50 to $250 per hour
• Australian app development agencies offer their services for $50-$150
• Western European and UK-based app developers are charging rates between $35 and $170
• Eastern Europeans (that's where we are) are pretty happy with $20 – $150
• Indian rates of $10-$80 per hour are enough attractive
• These costs depend on the features, intricacy, and mobile platform.
• One need to consider the back-end servers as well while determining the cost of developing mobile apps. Usually, back-end service will end up costing more.
• The cost of developing a basic app from India can be around $8,000 – $12000.
• Also, it is advisable to keep a little budget aside for the updates, marketing, and maintenance.

A mobile app developer will typically include fees of

• UX/UI designer who is responsible for creating the visual content to be coded into the project.
• A Project Manager, who undertakes to liaise with clients and coordinate with app developers for actually reaching the predetermined milestones.
• A Business Developer who is responsible for communicating with the Project Manager to carry out functions on behalf of director by supervising the mobile app development process.

13. Marketing an app

It is equally important to market an app to amongst your target users. Partly to set your foot right in the app store and slightly to sway audiences by letting them know that there's something critical in store for them. Make sure you perform A/B testing for efficient conversions.

Marketers often fall trap to commonly used techniques like undertaking SEO activities for app market and social media marketing. Instead, it is wise to master the art of mobile marketing hack and get things right for your business.

Conclusion

Keeping these things at the back of your mind before developing a mobile app can make your app less fragile. Having said that, mobile app development is a strategic call rather than a technical call and therefore it must be nurtured intrinsically in the company's values and objectives.

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Things To Know Before Designing An App

Source: https://www.peerbits.com/blog/things-to-know-before-building-an-app.html

Posted by: childressinks1998.blogspot.com

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