How to Build an App for Your Business With 10 Simple Steps?
September 17, 2024
Apps, albeit web or mobile, are not a stranger term for most of us. Many people are downloading apps to communicate with their relatives, play games, learn new languages, or use specific services (i.e., legal consultations). This also opens more avenues for businesses to increase their online presence through apps and reach a global audience. Therefore, the demand of building a business app has recently rose. But how can you develop an app that fits your business requirements? Keep reading this article to find it out!
Why Does Your Business Need an App?
Today, having an app is no longer an emerging trend, yet a necessity. With 5.44 billion internet users globally, developing a proprietary app that reflects your brand will increase your online engagement with existing customers and approach potential ones. This can involve direct, real-time communication with your target audience through in-app messaging, comments, or push notifications.
Further, various apps are now integrating with artificial intelligence (AI) and data analytics. These features allow apps to collect and analyze precious data (e.g., user behavior or emerging trends). The data gives an in-depth insight into customer satisfaction and business performance. This enables you to improve your marketing strategy and make informed business decisions. Plus, AI can automatically offer personalized content or recommendations to your target audience.
These apps also include such features as location-based services, easy navigation, or integrated payment systems. All these functionalities help streamline internal workflows and boost productivity. This brings a great competitive advantage to your business.
Having a well-designed app, accordingly, helps enhance customer experience and possibly increase sales for your business.
10 Steps to Build an App for Your Business
You’ve understood the benefits of having an app for your business. So, if you’re seeking some useful tips to start your mobile app creation for the first time, you’ve arrived at the right place. Let’s look at our pieces of advice below to get all the essential information for your very own mobile app development project.
1. Define Your Message
This rule applies to almost everything that is made to deliver to someone. What is your message? What are you trying to tell your users? And of course, it’s crucial to make it understandable and suitable for your target audiences.
Before starting working on your mobile app, make sure you’re certain about who you are (your business), what you’re selling, which positive values your team is sharing with our community, etc.
Moreover, your brand recognition is not only about inside values but also can be seen by the look or the feeling it brings to customers. For a mobile app, it’s in the colors, word font, or the logo’s position.
So, the combination of inside values and outside appearance that you put into your mobile app speaks loudly about the core message of your business, or particularly, one part of it.
In other words, it’s about choosing a fit style for it. Be careful, because your whole project will be broken down right from the very beginning if you fail you make your messages clear.
2. Understand Your Audience
Mobile apps are convenient places for people to interact with their favorite brands, but you have to know what your customers are most interested in. It’s a fir-needle for you to move on to the next step as well as for the entire project.
Apps allow different kinds of user experiences and community engagement than websites do, which results in more solid connections and more commercial opportunities. It depends on how effective your marketing campaign is to attract new users to your app but to keep them turning back, the power lies in how well your mobile app meets their requirements.
Users often spend more money on apps compared to websites. So to win that, you have to understand their needs and make your app an amazing solution that can drive loyalty, whether by pushing messages or having visual content.
3. Clarify Your Goals
This is the next essential step of the plan. Whether an app is successful or not depends heavily on the goals. And it’s your duty to set up appropriate goals to achieve.
Based on your vision and by each period, it can be the total number of downloads, how often people are coming back, and how responsive are customers when new features are launched. Even how viral is your content, how likely visitors will give you their e-mail addresses, how many people are active in your community, etc.
4. Create an Outline for Your App Features
After making clear what you want to achieve with your mobile app, it’s time to sketch out its scope. It’s time for your creativity to shine, let’s sit still and write down all the necessary functionalities and app features to execute solutions and results mapped out in the previous steps.
Some of the features may include:
- eCommerce integrations
- Contact us
- Forms
- Chat
- Push notifications
- Social sharing
Those features not only bring value to your app but also appear as your guidance throughout the entire app development process.
FURTHER READING: |
1. 7 Tips on How to Choose a Software Development Company |
2. How to Find a Software Development Company? |
5. Research Your Competitors
The next step is to look at what your successful competitors are already doing to lead their products through such a long way.
Don’t just focus on the local competitors, widen your view and look at the biggest companies in the same market in your country or even around the world. This will spark totally new ideas and point out existing gaps in the market, and maybe you can overcome them.
Go over their app layout, features, and functionalities, and take notes of anything that stands out that you think can potentially apply to your own mobile app product.
6. Choose Your Partner
Still, building a well-used app can be quite tough. If your company is not professional in software development, you may be discouraged by complex project management, high costs, long time working, and many implied risks along the way. In this case, outsourcing your app development project is a good option. However, choosing who to partner with is crucial as this decision can greatly impact the quality, cost, and timeline of your project.
There are several outsourcing options for you to consider: freelancers or development agencies. You can get some useful tips from our previous blogs here to choose the right partner:
Whether your choice, evaluate your potential partner carefully through criteria like their expertise, tech stacks, development procedure, budget, and timeline. Like at Designveloper, our teams have long-term experience of working with web and mobile app development projects. Depending on a client’s specific requirements, we’ll provide suitable estimations about must-have features, budget, and detailed workloads alongside a specific timeline for each development phase.
Normally, we often recommend the following tech stacks for app development projects:
- AWS for Infrastructure
- React/NextJS for Web development
- React Native/Flutter for cross platform Mobile development
- NestJS for Backend/Microservices development
- MongoDB/PostgreSQL for Database
7. Develop a Budget & Timeline
If you outsource the full-cycle mobile app development, the agency often helps you estimate a proper budget and time for the project. However, if you use in-house staff or hire freelancers to cover parts of development tasks, developing a realistic and measurable budget & timeline is essential.
There are many techniques to make accurate estimations. One of our frequently used techniques is Analogous Estimation. This allows you to look at past work, either within your company or from industry benchmarks, to have a rough estimation based on similar projects, whether budget or timeline. The technique keeps your budget realistic.
Otherwise, you can make a rough estimation based on resources (staff, tools, etc.). In other words, you need to calculate how much each resource costs per task, hour, or day. Then, you can multiply this by the estimated time each resource will require for the project. Also, apply this technique to compute how much time each resource (e.g., developers or designers) needs to complete their tasks.
Another popular technique is breaking down the cost by phase. As such, you need to estimate the cost or time each stage needs for different resources (like people, tech stacks, testing platforms, or marketing campaigns).
Sometimes, there are hidden costs or unexpected delays you can’t avoid due to ever-changing business requirements or market shifts. Therefore, developing a contingency budget is essential to address these problems. The recommended buffer is around extra 10-20% of the cost or time. This will prevent you from overspending if extra features are added or if anything wrong happens.
8. Design UX/UI
Once you’ve prepared for a budget & timeline plan, it’s time to design the user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) of your app. The app needs to be visually appealing and easy to use.
Begin by thinking carefully about how the target audience will interact with your app. Research your competitor apps if needed to better identify the best navigation for your users. Be it a horizontal bar, dropdown, or hamburger, the navigation should be simple. Our advice is not to put every feature in the app. Prioritize the most critical component first, then get feedback and make necessary adjustments. This allows your users to feel comfortable finding what they want with slightest effort.
For the aesthetic design, stay consistent with your brand. As such, the look and feel of the app must reflect what your business is. Accordingly, you need to use fonts, colors, and images that align with what users already knew about your brand. This allows for a seamless experience and builds trust with your customers.
9. Plan for Development and Testing
When your design is ready, let’s plan the development and testing stages. Your development plan should involve what type of development methodology is used (Agile, Waterfall, or Hybrid) and which steps are taken to bring your app to life. Breaking the development process into smaller phases allows you to track the progress along the way with ease.
Testing is equally crucial. This phase helps you detect any issues early on and make sure a seamless user experience. For this reason, you need to test the app thoroughly to ensure everything works as planned. There are various testing techniques you may consider. They involve alpha testing (testing the app within your team), beta testing (receiving feedback from real users), and user acceptance testing (verifying whether the app meets all your requirements).
10. Prepare for Launch & Post-Launch Support
When your app is done testing, it’s time to prepare for its launch. Start by devising a strategy for letting everyone know about the app. This can involve preparing documentation to deploy the app on an app store and promoting your app through different channels (i.e., social media or paid ads). The goal is to instill excitement and attract as many users as possible.
But deploying the app is not the end of the story. Mobile app development is an ongoing process. This means your app is not always perfect, which requires you to have a comprehensive plan for what may happen after deployment. This can be fixing bugs or adding new features based on user feedback. Frequent updates will keep your mobile app always innovative and ensure it constantly meets user needs. This will ensure the long-term success of your app.
Conclusion
After this article, we expect you to have a better understanding of how to build a mobile app successfully for your business. If you’re looking the right partner on this journey, consider Designveloper.
At Designveloper, we’re on a mission to help clients realize potential ideas and turn them into impactful applications available to all businesses. Improving and growing your business through mobile experience shouldn’t be costly, intimidating, and time-consuming. Instead, it should provide true values that you, your users, as well as your employees, can enjoy in the long run.
Drop us an email or a call, we surely can help you do that.
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