Mobiles are the “glue” that bring businesses and customers together. With the ultra-high and unprecedented penetration of mobile devices, it is important that a company should be aware of this readily available medium that can ensure that your voice can reach the masses.

A mobile app is probably the first thing on the checklist for any business today. Whether you are a news agency, a fashion store or a pharmacy; a mobile app is considered essential nowadays for any business that wishes to increase their reach. Mobile apps may also have been envisioned as a product or a solution by your company.

No matter what the use case or the need, a lot of thought and planning needs to go into creating a mobile app from scratch.

Here is our handy 7-point guide that will help you ensure that you are able to utilize your mobile app to its best potential.

Identify the problems

Before you build, know your customers. They will be using your mobile app and will be responsible for its ratings and will ultimately decide its success/failure in the heavily crowded mobile app market.

If you understand your target user base and know what problems they are facing with existing solutions, you can ensure that your solution fits their bill and offers a better solution to their existing issues.

Your ability to listen to your prospective customer and understanding their needs will differentiate your product from the competition.

Identify existing solutions

Before you build, understand your competition. If you’re building just another alternative to an existing, established mobile app, you have a long way to go before you hit the success jackpot. Knowing what your existing competition offers across platforms is as essential as building the product itself.

An ideal approach would be to address the problem statement in a simple- yet innovative fashion. This will ensure that people understand that you think out of the box and are willing to offer a solution that works the way they want it to work, not the other way round.

Identify stakeholders

Understanding the key stakeholders during the workflow is as important as actually building the solution. When you know the pain points and the requirements of each stakeholder at every stage, you can build a product that can offer a novel way to address these requirements, thereby gaining user traction and acceptability.

Validate your problem statement

Creating a test group for your app and including key stakeholders in that group can go a long way in ensuring that your mobile app will do what it needs to do. It is important to understand that every user has specific problems and specific needs. This test user group can provide valuable information that goes far beyond your existing knowledge base that was created during the discovery phase.

Identify goals and objectives

Understanding your goals and objectives is extremely important. A mobile app creation team that understands their situation in the mobile app world will always create solutions that succeed.

Whether you are to become a disruptor, an innovator or an existing behemoth that fends off competition by showcasing progress in a field they already are leaders in, your preview of the roadmap for your app can go a long way in ensuring success in the long term.

Another important aspect is to prioritize these goals so that you know exactly where to begin. Whether that goal is to create a new revenue stream or to enhance customer experience, your goals must be aligned and prioritized well so that you can deliver what you promise.

Creating an MVP or a minimally viable product

Spending too much time developing an app to its entirety can take a long time. This delay can often cause businesses to lose customers as the interest in the app wanes and at the same time, businesses can lose focus themselves, getting lost in the development process.

A minimally viable product is a great way to ensure that you tackle the most important part of the problem first, and not the whole problem in one go. Using a basic, but functional app as a base can help you enter the market quickly.

As most mobile app platforms offer upgrade paths that are near seamless, you can offer multiple releases that give newer features to users on a regular basis. This will help maintain user interest in your app and create a community of loyal users that also function as your initial suggestion for improvement bank.

Analyze

Analyzing your app’s performance is important, but often difficult to define and measure. With dozens of yardsticks to measure your app’s performance with, a good starting point could be queries that analyze the app’s transaction volume, cost-effectiveness, easy integration with platforms, user base and acceptance, brand perception and increased customer retention.

These queries can be a good head start towards analyzing how your app performs and how it ranks up with the competition.

Although all this information may seem daunting and a little too much at this stage, do not worry! The most difficult part about developing a mobile app is actually beginning the development process. Once you start and ensure that you follow the instructions in our guide, everything should ideally fall into place.

We at Volumetree understand that you might be new to the apps scene and may find it difficult to start your initial mobile app development project. We hope our handy 7-point guide has been helpful in your quest of building the perfect app. If you have any questions, comments or need our help converting your idea into an app, give us a shout and we will be glad to help you! Our mobile app development consultants are experienced, focused and ready with innovative solutions to your queries.