Creating a dedicated mobile app for your business is not an option anymore. In fact, it has become a necessity to stay relevant in today’s mobile-obsessed world. The hard part is not to create an app but to make it stand out from the crowd. The competition is fierce as your app might be competing against millions of other applications, who are also vying for user’s attention.
How can you make your app stand out from the crowd? That is where your mobile app strategy comes into play. Are you offering something that your competitors don’t? If you do, how can you promote your unique selling proposition to your target audience? Does your app deliver a great user experience without compromising on functionality? Answering all these questions is not only important for the success of your mobile app but it would be easier if you have the right mobile app strategy.
In this article, you will learn about seven strategies that will enhance the effectiveness of your mobile app development process and help you achieve great results.
1. Map Your App To Business Objective
Your app development process should start after you answer the following questions
- What goals do you want to achieve with your mobile app?
- Who is your target audience?
- What features you will include in your mobile app?
- What differentiates your app from others?
- Which platform you are planning o target?
After answering all these questions, you can go back to the drawing board and start your app development journey. This will not only give you a clear direction for every stage of the app development cycle but also assist you in aligning your app development objectives with your business objectives. That is why the App Development Company Dallas start their app development process by aligning app objectives to your business objectives.
2. Adopt a Rapid Development Method
Software development lifecycle has usually been linear as developers adopt the waterfall model for the software model. What this means that you can not move to the next stage after completing the previous stage. The pace at which custom software development has evolved has made the waterfall model obsolete. That is why most developers adopted agile, iterative, and rapid application development methods. That trend also trickled into mobile app development.
With tight deadlines and rapidly growing client requirements, developers need to deliver better results in a shorter span of time. With rapid application development models, you can drastically reduce the development time and make reviews faster and more convenient. On the flip side, you need a development team that is highly skilled and experienced to pull this off.
These rapid apps development methods give developers more flexibility to make changes mid-way through the project without shaking up the foundation of the app. What’s more, it also assists app developers in pushing updates faster to add more features to your app and enhance the overall user experience of your mobile app.
3. Put User Experience First
According to mobile app abandonment statistics, the global app abandonment rate stands at 25%. One of the main reasons for this is poor app user experience. This means that if you don’t pay attention to improving the user experience of your mobile app, you should be ready to lose app users in the long run.
If you want your app users to stay on your app, you need to deliver a great user experience. Incorporate more interactive elements such as animated transitions in your mobile app to keep the users engaged. You can also evoke user emotions to create an emotional attachment with your app users. Use a minimalistic user interface and avoid clutter as it confuses users and puts them off instead of keeping them engaged.
4. Prioritize Engagement Instead of Downloads
When businesses launch their dedicated mobile app, their primary goal is usually to get millions of downloads and installs in the first couple of weeks or months. Interestingly, you might even be able to achieve that goal as well. As soon as the hype dies down and users start getting bored of using your mobile app, they will abandon your mobile app and switch to alternatives that offer them unique features and an even better user experience.
The best way to prevent that is to focus more on user engagement instead of chasing millions of app downloads and installs. Start off by designing an efficient onboarding process that makes it easy for new users to settle into your app. You can promote offers, products, and discounts through push notifications, chat bots and in-app messages. Collect user feedback about your app and incorporate those changes in the future version of your app.
5. Third-Party Integration
Your app can not do everything but you can extend its capability with third-party integrations. Striking the right balance is critical because going overboard with third-party integrations can land you in hot waters. Most importantly, you need to ensure that these third-party services integrate and function as planned and do not hamper the user experience otherwise, there is no point in adding them at the expense of user experience.
6. App Security
Security has always been an Achilles heel of mobile apps. Despite efforts from Google and Apple to prevent malicious apps from getting into app stores, cybercriminals find a way to get dangerous apps to app stores. Even if they don’t succeed in it, they embed malicious code in apps that could not be detected during the app vetting process.
Mobile app developers need to create apps with security in mind. Educate users about how they can stay safe and take advantage of apps built-in security features. Use secure authentication methods to ensure that the right person can access the data.
7. Establish Governance and Monitoring Policies
When you create an app monitoring and governance policies will help app developers to solve problems before they can wreak havoc on your mobile app. Don’t forget to ignore scalability and migration when defining governance and monitoring policies.
Which mobile app development strategies do you use? Share it with us in the comments section below.