How To Create An App for Your Business

Today, people spend most of their time on mobile devices, mainly on the installed apps, especially those relevant to businesses. About 82% of businesses with professional apps have attained expected business growth and increased their app revenue. The reason behind their success is their professional mobile app holding various competitive advantages that permit more potential customers to engage with their business. So, at this point of the post, you might have understood how important creating a mobile app is for a business. Still, if you aren’t convinced, let’s check out the benefits of creating an app for your business.

Benefits Of Developing An App For Your Business

1. Improve Customer Engagement

Whenever you have a special app offer for your customers, you can schedule a push notification to let your app users know about that offer.

Moreover, you can automate your app to ask your app users for reviews and ratings whenever they shop for your products and services.

Building an app for your business also provides you an opportunity to complete the brand experience for your users.

A business site helps bring your brand to your users’ screens, but countless tabs may distract them easily. On the contrary, mobile apps allow you to offer distraction-free browsing as users are restricted from viewing an app at a time.

2. Build Brand Awareness

Once the users install your mobile app on their device, they will interact with your brand repeatedly. Even by creating in-built features, you will become able to engage with your app users consistently.

Developing an app for your business allows you to reach new potential audiences.

3. Direct Communication And Engagement With Customers And Clients

The mobile apps become invaluable for your business as they lead to the accumulation of customer information and buyer personas, and shopping behavior. You can use this data to improve your marketing strategies.

4. Boosting Sales And Revenue

About 52% of online shopping is done via mobiles as it demands fewer efforts to explore, search, and let you order the desired items within a few minutes.

You can create an app for your business to list products and services you want to sell with advanced search options, secure payment solutions, easy ordering steps to assist your business boost sales and increase revenue.

Mobile App Development Process

While many brands are going online to develop an app for their business, many still don’t know how to set up an app.

You can also attain success by developing an app for your business, but you need to follow the proper mobile app development process.

Now, we will check out an effective app development process that will last up to six stages.

1. Strategy

In this first stage, we will define the strategy that will help make your app ideas into successful app.

In this phase, you will

• Identify your app users
• Research your competition
• Make your app’s objectives and goals
• Choose a mobile platform for your app

2. Analysis And Planning

From this stage, your unique app idea will start taking its shape into an actual project.

You can start with analysis and planning by defining use cases and accumulating detailed functional needs.

After identifying the needs of your app, you can prepare a product roadmap. This demands prioritizing the mobile app needs and grouping them into delivery milestones.

If resources, time, or app development costs are your primary concern, then you can try defining your minimum-viable product (MVP) and make it your priority for the initial release.

In the planning phase, you need to identify the skills also for your app development initiative.

3. UI / UX Design

Your app design should deliver effortless and seamless user experiences with a perfect look.

The main objective of mobile app UI/UX design is to create the best user experiences making your app intuitive, interactive, and user-friendly.

A. Information Architecture & Workflows

This step will determine what your app will display to its users, the data it will accumulate, UI with finished goods, and the user journeys within your app.

Workflow diagrams identify all the possible interactions a user has with an app and its navigation structure.

B. Wireframes

Usually, we start designing an app by sketching on paper. So, here wireframes come into play. They are the digital form of sketchers; conceptual layouts, also known as low-fidelity mockups, offer visual structure to your app’s functional needs.

With wireframes, you can target user experience and aesthetics. It’s a cost-effective and quick approach to create mobile app wireframing for designing app layouts and iterating through them.

C. Style Guide

These are the living documents that include

• Font family your app’s text will use
• Color scheme
• How will the company brand look in the app design?

Style guides add up to an app design strategy. Crafting a style guide in the initial stages of app development will enhance the productivity of your app developers. Moreover, it will help keep the look and feel of your app consistent.

Moreover, you should check app design guidelines from Google for Android apps and Apple for iOS apps.

D. Mockups

High-fidelity designs, mockups are the final graphics of your app’s visual design. When you apply your style guide to your app wireframes, it creates mockups.

E. Prototype

Prototypes help in enhancing the app’s workflow and user experience. It may be time-consuming to develop a prototype, but your efforts would be worth it as they allow early-stage testing of your app’s functionality and design. Usually, prototypes assist in identifying the changes made to the app’s proposed functionality.

4. App Development

Well, planning is an integral part of the app development process. But, before the actual development starts, you need to:

• Define the technical structure,
• Choose a technology stack, and
• Define the development milestones.

Typically, a mobile app project is composed of three integral sections:

• Back-end/Server technology,
• API(s), and
• Front-end

A. Back-End

This part of the project includes server-side objects and databases essential for supporting your app’s functions. If you are using your current back-end platform, you may need to perform changes to support the expected mobile functionality.

B. API

A method of communication between the app and its back-end server/database is known as an Application Programming Interface (API).

C. Front-End

A native mobile app that an end-user will use is the front-end. Mobile apps hold interactive user experiences that use a back-end and an API for handling data in many cases. But, in some cases, when a mobile app demands users to work without internet access, the app may use local data storage.

For the back-end, you can use any web programming language and database. There are various programming languages and technology stacks that you can use for developing a mobile app for your business.

5. Testing

After mobile app development, the app is passed onto the team of testers for validation.

By making your app perform QA testing, you will get a functional, stable, and secure app. Before starting your app testing, you need to create test cases that may point to every aspect of mobile application testing.

Like use cases drive the mobile app development process, test cases also drive app testing. Test cases perform tests, record testing results for quality evaluation, and track resolutions for retesting.

The best approach is to involve your QA experts in the Analysis and Design phases. When they get familiar with your app’s objectives and functional needs, it will quickly produce accurate test cases.

You may allow your app to undergo the below testing modes to deliver the best quality mobility solution.

A. User Experience Testing

It measures how easy and user-friendly your app is. This type of testing targets the user’s ease of using the app, the app’s flexibility to handle controls, and the caliber of the app to meet its targets. Be sure that your app uses consistent fonts, color schemes, style treatments, icon design, padding between data, and navigation. Also, ensure your app meets the original design guidelines to impact your user adoption directly.

B. Functional Testing

Functional testing is performed to ensure that every app component is performing as expected. Moreover, it makes sure that users can enjoy the app’s functionality and features with no issues. The functional testing is further divided into system testing and unit testing.

If you are developing an app for Android and iOS mobile platforms, your functional testing needs to include a feature comparison between both versions of your app.

C. Performance Testing

This type of non-functional testing tests an app’s quality under different capacities. Performance testing is essential as it offers insight into the app’s aspects, like stability, speed, and scalability. Without it, the app users may encounter poor app usability.

D. Security Testing

Security is an essential concern for mobile apps. Any potential vulnerability may result in a hack. You can make your app secure by following a few simple measures. The security testing ensures that the app is free from any risks or threats that can lead to a loss. This type of testing targets finding possible weaknesses and loopholes of the system that may result in the loss of the organization’s reputation or information.

E. Device And Platform Testing

Usually, new mobile devices launch every year with new firmware, hardware, and design. Mobile OS updates every few months.

Various mobile device manufacturers use the Android platform but customize the platform for their devices. Mobile devices come in different shapes and sizes.

Apple control both OS and hardware; that’s why it has a more controlled environment.

A mobile app should be tested on various mobile devices or device simulators to ensure the app performs smoothly for all users.

Companies usually prefer building their enterprise apps for a single mobile platform because of ongoing support costs, app testing complexity on all mobile devices, and device management.

6. Deployment & Support

Launching a native app demands submission of your app to the App Stores. Before the release, you would need a developer account with Google Play Store and Apple App Store.

In the app store, an app release needs setting up metadata including:

• App’s Title
• Category
• Description
• Keywords
• Appstore screenshots
• Launch icon

After submitting your app on the App Store, it goes through a review process that may take a few days or several weeks depending on your app’s quality and how aptly it follows development guidelines.

There’s no review process with Android apps, and within a few hours of submission, you can find your app available on the app store.

After you find your app in the app stores, you should monitor its usage through analytics platforms and track KPIs to measure your app’s success.

If you want your users to keep engaged, support them with patching the app frequently with improvements.

Conclusion

App development is a constant process that continues even after launching as you get user feedback and develop additional functionality. You can follow the same process for all apps we create. You can follow the same process for all apps we make.