Starting off on your journey as an app developer is an exciting new prospect where you can put your technical skills to good use. Developing an app can be a great challenge, whether you’re more adept in coding, networking, or design.
You and your team may have a fantastic idea for an app, plus the skills to see it through to completion, but there are some things that you need to keep in mind when pursuing this goal. To help you with this brand-new endeavor, we’ve put together these handy tips for you to keep in mind during development.
Know Your Audience
When creating an app, you may love the idea, but if it’s incredibly niche to your interests, you may find that ultimately your app won’t be as popular as you’d hoped. It’s important then that you have a good idea as to who your audience will be and build your app to suit them. You can do this by taking a look at your competitors to see what you can do differently, as well as what their users like and dislike about their app.
You can also conduct direct research with your audience by posting on forums and social media to get an idea of what people are looking for. Ultimately, you want to find a good gap in the market for your app so that you can develop it with the confidence that it will likely be well received.
Learn From The Mistakes Of Others
As well as learning about your audience, you’ll also want to take a look at certain projects that may have failed. Apps that your intended audience has poorly received are a great marker as to what you shouldn’t be doing.
Of course, even some of the best-planned projects and innovative ideas don’t get to see the light of day for a myriad of reasons, but more often than not, if a project has failed, it’s because of mistakes made by the developers. Glean what you can from these failed apps, whether it was poor marketing or bad design, and factor these mistakes into your business plan so that you can avoid them as best as you can.
Work On Your App’s Security
One of the worst things that can happen to your app after launching is that it experiences a serious security breach, putting your data and that of your customers at risk. To avoid this, it’s important that you have a good grasp of how to maintain the security of your app. You can do this in many ways, and one great way to do this is via application security testing, in which you can automate a lot of this process.
Using this method will remove a lot of the need to test things yourself and, therefore, free up time for you and the rest of your team to develop other app features further. Of course, it’s smart to oversee this testing process, and your coders will be required to fix any of the issues that appear, but the testing process itself is the most time-consuming.
Make Use Of Customer Feedback
It’s important to keep an eye on how your users feel about your app after it’s released. Continued updates and maintenance are essential as a successful app development, so you shouldn’t avoid listening to the response from your users. While some user reviews may be unnecessarily critical and unreasonable, such as those from internet trolls, that doesn’t mean that all negative reviews aren’t legitimate.Â
Take the time to engage with these reviewers and try to ease their concerns by providing a helpful response as well as thanking them for their feedback. Don’t dismiss these negative reviews. Instead, take them on board and use them to influence future fixes and changes.
Don’t Forget About The User Experience
When you design an app, one of the most significant factors to consider is the user experience. Your app may be the result of great innovative ideas and could be incredibly useful or fun, but if it somehow doesn’t feel good to use, you might still lose users who are struggling to get to grips with it. This poor user experience could be caused by a bad layout or confusing design choices, so to avoid these issues, it’s very important that you keep this aspect in mind during development. A lot of this will be down to the designers, but coders also have a duty to make sure everything feels good to use too.
The actual functionality of your app is a pivotal part of the user experience, but so are things like download size and speed and how easy it is to find. On top of that, many users may even decide against using your app after downloading if they then have to go through a lengthy account creation process. Do everything you can to make this whole process go smoothly to encourage a more positive response from your users.