7 User Story Examples to Guide Your Fintech Mobile App’s UX
Mobile Application Development 7 min read
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Home Blog Mobile Application DevelopmentA Primer on What is Mobile App Development and How it’s Done
Mobile Application Development 7 min read
Mobile Application Development 7 min read
Mobile Application Development 7 min read
Mobile Application Development 6 min read
Mobile Application Development
With mobile at the forefront of online experiences, the need to understand what is mobile app development and how it can be harnessed for business growth has become more urgent.
You and mobile app development companies can happily note that mobile apps are expecting accelerated growth in the present, years to come. In terms of revenue, global revenue from mobile apps is projected to balloon to around $935 billion in 2023.
Not really a surprising – if not an expected trend – occurence especially since as mobile app downloads in 2020 amounted to about 218 billion.
Beginning to sound like an interesting venture for your brand, already? Then perhaps you’d like to explore more about it before you jump into mobile app development.
First, let’s define what is mobile app development.
Mobile app development is simply a process or the act of developing an application specifically for mobile devices.
These mobile devices include smartphones, tablets, and computers. They are pre-installed in devices, or delivered as a web application.
Though it may sound simple, there are many considerations that your mobile app developers take into account when building. Things like user interface, layout, and the device interactions are planned out in order to provide a smooth user experience within the app environment.
READ ALSO: 5-step Guide on How to Write User Stories for Mobile Apps
Photo courtesy of Rami Al-zayat via Unsplash
You may be surprised, especially if it’s your first time developing a mobile app, that there are different kinds of apps that one can build.
Studying them will help you identify and communicate your exact needs to your partner developers:
Photo courtesy of Omid Armin via Unsplash
Now that you know the types of mobile apps you can create, it’s time to decide which app development platforms to use. Here are some of the most common and popular ones being used by many brands and businesses.
Photo courtesy of Árpád Czapp via Unsplash
Launching a successful mobile app is a very rigorous process. One misstep may cause your team to repeat the steps from the beginning.
In developing a mobile app for your brand or business, you will want to create your own flow, scaled to your overall business capabilities and requirements. But if you don’t know how to get started on going about that, here are some steps you can take at the beginning.
As cliche as it sounds, everything begins with a lightbulb moment, even if it’s just a vague one.
This idea should be inspired by how you imagine your mobile app solving problems for and around your end-users (be it internal stakeholders, or external ones) lives.
Here, you need to have a deeper understanding of your brand and customers; what makes them tick? And what aspects of their way of life can you help make easier with your app? A solid background on data and insight development will help tremendously in this area.
Take a look at the possibilities and limitations of having an app for the business before investing a good amount of time and money into the development of this project.
Once the idea is set, it’s time to list down the functionalities and data that you would like your customers to see on the app. Wireframing and workflowing are also common best practices for mobile app development that help your team go about the build efficiently.
Wireframing is making sure all functional elements have a place in the app. These can be found multiple times within the frame or just once, depending on their importance or relevance. The wireframe is one of the most important steps in mobile app development, as the entire coding process depends on it.
Once the wireframe is done, it’s time to create the workflow of your app. The workflow is the pathways or the funnels that users travel through within the app environemnt. In this phase, it’s important to mind how many clicks your user needs to do to complete a single action. The lesser clicks to complete a task, the better the workflow.
Now that the wireframes and workflow are done, it’s now time to take a look at the technical feasibility of your mobile app.
As mentioned, developing a mobile app has a lot of requirements. So it’s important to assess and evaluate if the elements and functions implemented are correct, legal, and compatible to your target end-user’s platforms and devices.
If there is even one loose string here, it shouldn’t be given approval to launch.
Have your app undergo a technical feasibility study to check if the hardware, software, and other components meet app development standards.
With the go-signal given, it’s time to create a prototype of the mobile app.
Developing a prototype is where you can map out the overall look, feel, and functionality of your finished product without having to go through the entire coding process.
In creating the prototype, your business and the app developers can analyze these three important points of a mobile app:
Here comes the fun part. It’s now time to take your wireframes and workflow and replace the grayscale elements with the actual app design.
You can incorporate your brand’s style guide. However, it’s important to not let yourselves be limited to the style guide alone. Take a look at trendy apps and incorporate some design and elements you think will be helpful in making your mobile app the talk of the town.
In designing the app, it’s important to be consistent with the elements used in all frames and landing pages. This will provide your users with a frictionless experience with your app.
FURTHER READING: A User Experience Design Guide For Beginners
In this step, your developers will begin analyzing the design, overall framework, and workflow to come up with the coding needed to deploy the finished app.
Before taking this step, make sure that everything – from the workflow, overall design, and prototype, is approved. Otherwise, if you decide to make changes during the development, you will go back to square one – and nobody wants that.
It’s important to think back to your considerations established early on like compatibility with various platforms, since this also dictates which tools you’ll need. This is because iOS and Android are fundamentally different platforms which you’ll need varying tools for.
FURTHER READING: The Best Mobile App Development Software for Jump-starting Your 2022 Projects
After the coding is done, you and your team should test out the app before deploying it.
For a thorough and unbiased testing and evaluation process, enlist third-party evaluators to test your app and have them check for the following:
Once everything is done, polished, and approved you can now proceed to launching your app and deploying it to various app stores. But it doesn’t just end there.
After launching, you’ll also want to optimize it for maximum visibility which you can achieve in two ways:
For the former, this guide to app store optimization should be able to help you get a grasp on the basic requirements.
Meanwhile, determining your strategies for promotions should rely on a clear goal which, at first, could be getting as much downloads as you can. As you get to a desired amount of downloads and userbase, what can you focus on next?
Answer those questions, then strategize how you can achieve those goals, accordingly.
Developing a mobile app for your business is an exciting venture to take on. However, much like anything in digital marketing, you can’t do it without a plan – much less if you don’t know even the basics of what you plan on tackling.
Apart from what we’ve established above, note these things when developing your own brand applications:
Looking to launch your own app soon? What business or consumer needs compelled you to venture into it? Share your thoughts with us in the comments, or drop us a line over on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. We’d love to share ideas with you.
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