Points To Consider Before Making A Mobile Application

With the rapid increase in the usage of smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices, mobile industry is booming. Smartphone; as the fad of iPads, iPhones, or Android phones rises the usage of apps, which is also increasing drastically. People can’t even imagine how their life can be without mobile phones, which they use for making calls, scheduling and organizing business meetings, connecting with their friends via chat or social networks, playing games and even tracking their health issues. And this is all possible because of those ingenious apps.

Today we have many key players in the mobile application world like Google Android, Windows Phone, Nokia etc. And, with the inception of App stores, mobile users were flooded with millions of applications. Lots of it! Just a quick fact before we begin – as of October 2013, there are approximately 1,000,000 apps in the iPhone App Store. However, with the sea of opportunity comes the greater tides of challenges. As users have multiple choices of platforms and applications to choose from, it’s a big challenge for developers and publishers to get their application downloaded. And, for getting good downloads, proper mobile application strategy is important. Every app is different, but kink-free coding, alluring designs and proper testing ensure app’s success. That means it should be delivered on time, bug-free, have captivating designs, and does everything it is supposed to do. Let’s take a look into the steps to follow while developing a mobile app:

Proper Assessment of the tasks
-Understand the details
-Analyze your audience
-Compose use cases

Competitor Analysis
-Prepare a list of your competitor and top trending apps
-Analyze stats
-Give competitive products a try

Search for inspiration and interface mechanics
-Look at Scoutzie, Dribbble and Behance
-Stay up-to-date on recent articles and design concepts
-Explore other devices and platforms

Combine your findings
As a result of your search, you will inevitably end up with a huge pile of articles, photos, screen-shots and reviews. Now, put all of that away and then sit and think, how could you combine the most successful mechanics and interfaces, ideas and concepts, while considering the interest of your target audiences. Could you do it? Great, let’s go on then.

Eliminate Overhead

Remove Secondary functions : The first version of the product must include only the core features and functionalities, and everything else should be saved for the consecutive releases.

Do your best on the primary functions: Focus on the primary functions and polish them – all the critical functions of the product need to work perfectly. Spend ample time to focus on core functionalities of the app.

Compare with the original goal: It’s very obvious that you’ll get carried away while working on a projects. As you’re involved in development and designing of your app, don’t forget the original goal while considering business, audience and key functionalities. If everything is going as planned, carry on. If not, then you need to reconsider your processes.

Compare with the platform guidelines :Spend some time to compare if your designs comply with the platform’s guidelines: corner radiuses, angle of light and shadows, font size and many other minor details because they have a major role in look and feel of a product, and many of them are different for different platforms.

Test the prototypes
-Test the prototypes on your devices
-Give it a go, on multiple screens

Focus on Details
-Consider animations
-Pick action sounds
-Add little pleasures

Beta test the product and review design
-Be acyive in development phase
-Prefer beta testing
-Compare the developed product to the original designs
-Don’t be afraid to append and change the product along the way

Gather Reviews
-Read everything people say about the app
-Follow blogs and articles (if any), that have written anything about your app

Showcase your work
You’ve finally created your app, got the approval from appstores, now the next big thing is waiting to get downloaded. Yes, creating an app is only half of the work. The other half is promoting it, and your number of downloads will depend on how good you are at that.

The best way to do it is by going through social media and app promoting networks. There are some very good networks like Behance, Pinterest and Instagram that can help you in showcasing your app and collecting peer opinions. So yes, you have to promote your app and promote it good!

(Note: This is just knowledge sharing not for promotional basis)

— modified on Jul 18, 2014, 12:26:08 PM