Four Phases To Building The Right Mobile Apps

The increased dependence on mobile apps during the pandemic is now transforming into a permanent change in consumer behavior. Individuals run their lives on a network of interconnected apps, with a projected revenue generation of $935 billion by 2023.

Keeping up with the shift, many businesses are launching new apps as fast as their teams can work. They jump onto the app bandwagon with the assumption that it’s just about identifying the kind of app they need and briefing the app development team to get it done. However, there are certain aspects of the process that are easily overlooked, leaving businesses with apps that don’t bring in the expected results.

Here’s a look at four phases to building apps that should work for your business.

1. Conceptualization: Ensure Your Mobile App Adds Value

In the rush to launch an app, companies often don’t spend enough time evaluating exactly what app their customers need or what would serve their business goals. Consequently, the app doesn’t gain much traction, becoming a sunk cost.

In my experience, the following steps can help ensure businesses zero in on the “right” mobile app:

• Identify the common business challenges that need to be solved in order to meet your strategic objectives. These could be customer challenges or internal operational challenges. Identifying these can give you the possible scenarios where an app-based solution is “needed.”

• Conduct user research to understand the exact pain points of the end user in each of the identified scenarios. This outlines what a new mobile app should be capable of in order to remedy them.

• Follow this up with market research to identify which apps already exist to solve some of the challenges identified. Then, evaluate whether you have a mobile app concept that offers something new, solves something better or offers a superior experience.

At the end of this process, you should be left with mobile app ideas that fill a gap in the market and create value for your end user.

2. Preparation: Put In Place The Prerequisites

Once you have identified what to build, it’s time to lay the groundwork. There are three key decisions to be made at this stage:

• Budget. It makes sense to consider how the app contributes to your strategic business objectives and then dedicate a proportionate amount of your technology budget toward app development. In terms of time investment, the criticality of the app in your growth plans and prevalent market conditions can help determine the timeline you can allow for app development.

• Platform and tech stack. Depending on the intended audience/users of the app, you have to decide what kind of mobile app to develop. The choice is between the different types of mobile app development — native, Android, iOS or hybrid. How you choose between these options will depend upon the type of devices you plan to launch your app on (mobiles, tablets, wearable tech) and the types of device OS your IT environment is prepared to support. 

 

You will also have to make a call on the platform options to build your app. You may decide to choose a low-code or no-code platform and have an internal team develop the app, or you may decide to collaborate with a third-party team that has specific expertise in handling mobile application build as well as guiding overall app strategy.

• Teams. Whether you choose a no-code/low-code platform or traditional custom-coded app development, it makes sense to consider hiring a third-party team to handle the technical aspects. It should have the requisite expertise and experience to deliver it within a given time and budget.

At this stage, you need to evaluate available app development firms and identify the one that best fits your requirements. This means it has the skills to build the app you want and closely align with your design, quality, and security expectations.

3. Execution: Design, Development, Deployment

This is when your app actually starts to take shape. While the aspects of design, development and deployment seem self-explanatory, I wish to outline a couple of commonly overlooked elements:

• App design. Skipping over in-depth user research and UI design can lead to a difficult user experience and adversely impact user retention on the app. Businesses shouldn’t cut corners on elements like UX research and documentation, consistent design system and intuitive UI.

• Leveraging automation. While custom mobile app development is a manual process, there are aspects of QA and deployment that can be automated. Automation ensures thorough checks across the entire codebase every time new code is pushed so you don’t have unexpected breakdowns for previously working features.

4. Iteration: Feedback Gathering And Implementation

Apps typically go through several rounds of testing before a full-scale release. It’s important to have a well-defined process for gathering and evaluating feedback at this stage.

A few common ways of gathering feedback are:

• Asking questions that bring out specific data on users’ ability to use the app.

• Analyzing and clustering user behavior to identify usage patterns.

• A/B testing different features to make choices based on data.

The key is to quickly incorporate the feedback and get the iterations tested again. A fast feedback loop can ensure that elements that don’t work are fixed before the errors become too well-baked into the system. Shorter sprints and QA and deployment automation are crucial for a smoothly running feedback loop.

Pro tip: Not all user feedback is important or should be incorporated right away. While users will share their overall feedback for the app, businesses should evaluate every suggested iteration based on its potential impact on the final product. This can help you effectively prioritize and implement the feedback.

Mobile app development goes far beyond just writing the code. A faster go-to-market for your app means nothing if it doesn’t create value for the end users. It’s necessary to understand and put work into all four stages — concept, preparation, execution and iteration — to build the right apps for your business.

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Article Source:https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2021/12/20/four-phases-to-building-the-right-mobile-apps/?sh=47fe1cd63b7b