Having a mobile app is nowadays necessary for any kind of business. With the advent of smartphones and internet, people are spending maximum time on mobile apps to explore events nearby, gather news and get everyday alerts. Tapping this opportunity, many businesses have developed their own dedicated mobile apps to better engage with their customers and stay ahead of competitors. To create a successful mobile app you need to follow a systematic approach to app development. We have summarized 10 steps to create a successful mobile application to help you out in this process.
1) A great imagination leads to a great app
To create a successful mobile application, the first thing you need to keep in mind is:
Identify a problem which can be resolved by your app
Decide the features of your app
The app should provide customer with tangible benefits including reducing costs via productivity enhancements, new revenue or improving the customer experience.
2)Identify
To create a successful mobile app, you need to identify or be clear about:
Application target users – An app should always be developed keeping in mind the target users of an application. Having a clear vision regarding the target group, enhance the success ratio of an app.
Mobile platforms and devices to be supported – Mobile platforms and devices should be selected keeping in mind hardware performance, battery life, ruggedness and required peripherals. Certain factors that needs to be considered while selecting mobile platforms and devices includes coverage, device support, performance and other features.
3.Designing App
Designing your app is yet another significant factor responsible for success of an app in the market. An app developer should concentrate on the UI design, multi-touch gestures for touch-enabled devices and consider platform design standards as well. Today, emphasis is on the UI design of an app as it plays a crucial role in the success of an app. Designing an app is becoming increasingly popular as it create an instant impact on the mind of the user while ensuring usability of an app.
4.Identify approach to develop the app
Selecting the right approach for developing an app is highly important. Ideally, app development approach must be in accordance with the time and budget constraints of a client.
Native: Native apps enables in delivering the best user experience but require significant time and skill to be developed. These apps are basically platform specific and require expertise along with knowledge. Native apps are costly as well as time taking to be developed and deliver the highest user experience amongst all the approaches.
Web: Web apps are quick and cheap ones to develop and can run on multiple platforms. These are developed using HTML5, CSS and JavaScript code. These web apps are less powerful than native apps.
Hybrid: Hybrid approach is the latest approach to develop any app. This approach combines prebuilt native containers with on-the-fly web coding in order to achieve the best of both worlds. In this approach, the developer augments the web code with native language to create unique features and access native APIs which are not yet available through JavaScript.
5.Develop a prototype
Next stage, after identifying the approach is developing a prototype. It is actually the process of taking your idea and turning it into an application with some basic functionality. A prototype makes it quite easier to sell your idea to potential buyers who can now actually view the tangible benefits instead of just visualizing or reading product description. It is quite helpful in attracting investors and working with manufacturers and finding licensees.
Even while working on a prototype, do ensure you take measures to secure your app against unauthorized usage and access to data.
6.Integrate an appropriate analytics tool
There is also a need to incorporate appropriate analytics which gives you a detailed picture of how many visitors use your webs, how they arrived on your site and how can they keep coming back.
Some of the mobile analytics tool which helps in this process:
Google Analytics
Flurry
Localytics
Mixpanel
Preemptive
7.Identify beta-testers
Beta testing is the first opportunity to get feedback from your target customers. It is especially important as it enhances your visibility in the app store. It not only reduce product risk but get you that initial push in the app store. To identify beta testers is another important task to ensure success of an app.
8.Release / deploy the app
Deploying an app requires plan, schedule and control of the movement of releases to test and live environments. The major objective of Deployment Management is to ensure the integrity of the live environment is protected and that the correct components are released.
9.Capture the metrics
There has been significant rise in the mobile app users in the present decade. As a result, the need to collect accurate metrics is highly important. As the number of consumers using mobile applications steadily rises, the need to collect accurate metrics from them is increasingly important. Unfortunately, many of the methods used to measure apps are taken from web analytics.
10.Upgrading your app
After capturing the metrics it becomes important to upgrade your app with improvements and innovative features. A mobile app without innovative features loses its usability in long run. Upgrading your app with innovative features enhances its visibility along with downloads of an app.
