Creating mobile apps is an important step in solidifying your brand and building your reputation.
If your company isn't already thinking about adding a mobile app to your offerings, now is the time. In Q1 2023, mobile devices accounted for 58.33% of global website traffic . This is significant enough to not be avoidable, so your business should really jump on the mobile bandwagon ASAP.
When you sit down for your first meeting to develop a mobile app strategy, there are certain things you should consider before getting too deep into it. If you ignore these issues, you could end up with a failed app on your hands, which equates to wasted time and money. When the bottom line is affected, those at the top will look down with disdain.
You don't want that.
So how can you avoid this problem? You take into consideration some crucial ideas and questions that can help make your app deployment a success. Let's dig deeper and find out what these things are.
1. Create an elevator pitch
You may or may not have heard of “Elevator Pitch,” but it’s kind of like that. You have the time it takes for an elevator to reach your target's floor to launch the app. How do you distill your app explanation into a short enough tone to capture your target's attention before they exit the elevator?
You might think this is a silly exercise, but it gets right to the main point of your application. When you can create a successful pitch, it means you truly understand what your app is about – you know what the app will do and how those who use it will benefit from it.
Surprisingly, “Elevator Pitch” is harder than you think because you need to fully understand what your company does, what it wants from the app, and why a consumer would want to use it.
2. Define your concept
This is directly linked to “Elevator Pitch”, but it’s a little more bottom-up. While the “Elevator Pitch” can be used to sell your idea to CEOs, the concept is more about helping developers understand what they need to do to make it work.
Where an “Elevator Pitch” could be “Our app is an interesting store focused on our products that helps initiate purchases from mobile devices”, a concept could be “A dynamic SPA that leverages big data and hybrid cloud infrastructure to make possible for consumers to more easily interact with our website from mobile devices.”
3. Define your market
With your “Elevator Pitch” out of the way, it’s time for you to fully understand your market. Would your clients/customers access your company's online presence from a mobile browser or a mobile app? Are they primarily Android or iOS users (or a mix)? What is the age range, education level and economic situation of your market? What is the main location of your market? And what is the technical acumen of your market?
These are all very important questions that you must answer, otherwise you will go into building your mobile app blindly. This information will not only help your developers design and build the app, but it will also help your marketing team market the app. It doesn't matter how brilliant the app is: if you can't market it successfully, the app will fail.
4. Establish your goals
Following the market's footsteps, you must know what your objectives are. Do you want to monetize the mobile app or is it for informational purposes only? Do you want to develop an application that scales to meet global demand? Do you intend to integrate the mobile application with your website or other solutions?
If you go into that first development meeting without knowing your goals, you'll find that many attendees will leave disappointed or confused.
5. Consider user experience
UX stands for User Experience and is an extremely important factor. You could develop the best mobile app in the world, but if the user experience is bad, the app will fail. What is UX, then? It's all about experience. How easy is it to navigate your app? How intuitive is the interface?
You don't want to design a user interface that confuses those who use it. That's why you should spend a lot of time on user experience, to ensure that anyone who installs your app doesn't need to read a user manual first. Keep it simple, easy to use and modern.
6. Know your resource limits
This will be an important question to answer, especially as your app usage increases. If you anticipate a huge amount of users, you will have to be prepared for those numbers with your databases, any required cloud resources, and the data pipelines involved. If you plan your resources poorly, you may end up with bottlenecks that slow down your application performance.
If you know your market and know that it is global, having a good handle on your resource limits will make proper planning easier.
7. Think about what type of app is best for your business
You have a few options here: native mobile app, hybrid mobile app, or web app. Which one you choose will make a big difference in how you approach the development process. This choice can also mean the difference between an app that works well and one that just causes headaches.
It all boils down to this:
- Native apps install directly on the mobile device and have the best performance. However, this type of application costs more to develop because you must create a separate application for each system.
- Hybrid apps can be installed on devices as if they were native apps, but they run through a web browser. Hybrid apps are built with HTML5, so they are cheaper to create and still gain a slight performance boost over web apps.
- Web apps don't install on the device, they're cheaper to develop, they can scale to fit any screen, but they don't take advantage of mobile device hardware, so they tend to be the slowest performing apps.
So, if you want the best performing app and are not worried about the cost, go for the native app. If you want the cheapest app that performs the same on any device and aren't worried about performance, go for the web app. If you prefer the middle ground, choose the hybrid app.
Conclusion
Don't rush blindly into mobile app development, otherwise you risk failure and having to start over. If you are entering the mobile app space now, you are already late and wasting time is not ideal. So go to the first development meeting having considered all these questions and you will be 2 or 3 steps ahead.
