App Development 101: Tips for a Seamless Development Process

One day, an app idea enters your head – like a lightning bolt.

You can picture the success story and the gap in the market. But now, imagine this: two weeks before you launch, another app appears in the marketing place, almost identical to your concept.

Many entrepreneurs fear this scenario. But you can create an app with a seamless yet swift approach that maximises your chance of being first to market. Here’s how.

Decide on Your Goals and Target Customer

It’s tempting to have an overambitious plan when creating your own app. You may think of an innovation that targets everyone. But the opposite approach – targeting narrowly – is often the more successful strategy.

Focusing on a precise goal will help you shape your app’s better, cleaner design. It will stop your development from becoming complex and bloated, whatever types of apps you aim to build.

It will also help you when marketing and selling your app.

A niche development when you build an app means you’ll have an equally specific target customer. That will benefit you by helping your app stand out from the thousands of others on the app store.

Make Usability Your Priority

A well-designed new app will wow your audience. However, building an app with exceptional design doesn’t equate to complicated and clever features.

The best designs are also the simplest. Achieve that goal through a UI/UX-led design approach. Here, you’ll build your app around the principle of an intuitive user interface.

Each point in your design and development process will require you to strip back your design to improve its simplicity. If you get this right, you’ll have an app that looks beautiful and enjoyable.

Be Generous With Your Testing Time

It’s common for businesses to get to the end of the app coding and rush a release before thoroughly testing an app.

It’s easy to see why this happens. Projects face delays; the last item before the deadline is often the testing phase. But that’s a risky strategy and could leave you with an app that gets poor feedback and a low adoption rate.

Instead, do two things at the start of your app development. First, allow more time for testing than you think you need. Secondly, bring testing to the beginning of your project rather than waiting until the end-to-end build is ready.

Create a Cross-Platform App

If you want to scale your app, you need to start thinking about how you will do that during the early initiation days of a project plan for cross-platform support for your build.

Making your app work on multiple devices will save you time redoing things later. And it will keep your strategy flexible – allowing you to scale quickly rather than waiting for additional development work.

Cross-platform support from the start will also help you design a highly usable app. That will help you get positive feedback from users, whatever platform they use to access your app.