How to Create a Mobile App That Outsmarts the Competition

The amount of time people spend on their mobile phones increases with the years, and so is the number of people using mobile devices. It’s safe to say that mobile has almost completely taken over the desktop. With the bunch of users crossing over to mobile, it has become essential to create apps that can provide seamless and engaging mobile experiences.

For a business, there are plenty of ways in which an app can be of help. Some of these include:

● Improving sales and improving revenue generation.

● Building a community and engagement by providing the audience with resources.

● Being an internal business app can help to improve employee communication.

● Improving mobile marketing strategy and increasing brand awareness.

Even though there are many positives to it, creating an app can be tedious and intimidating. It can be costly, risky, and can take a lot of time, but if you create the app well enough, it will be worth everything in the end. To create a smart mobile app that beats the competition, here are some tips.

Define the app objectives

The first step before you even start creating a mobile app is defining your reasons and clearly stating the app’s objectives. If you don’t have clarity about small details like this, it will affect your planning and app building. In the end, you are not likely to have the desired result.

There are two things that you must try to satisfy with your app. Firstly, the ideal goal of users. Secondly, the purpose of your business. To determine these, you have to ask yourself specific questions:

● Which parts of your business do you need to improve?

● How can an app help solve the problem?

● What are the possible results that you might get?

Some other areas of your business that you also have to look into are your budget, timeline, research on market and competitor, etc.

State the functions and features of the app

After stating the purpose and objectives of your app clearly, your next step would be to define the scope of your mobile app. From here, you start to determine how the app will look like and the features that it will have. You need to be creative and make a list of necessary functionalities and features that you need to accomplish your desired results.

Some features that you may include in your app are:

● eCommerce integrations

● Social sharing

● Chat

● Push notifications

● Forms

● Contact us

Write down all the valuable features to your app and let this guide you through your app development process.

Research app competition

Although you already are sure of what you are building and what you need in your app, you might want to look at some of your most successful competitors. Consider what they are doing with their app and how it is helping them to reach some similar goals with you.

Be sure not to look at just your local competition. Research some of the bigger companies in the same industry as yours, reaching out to a similar audience in your country or other parts of the world. With this, you can get inspired and get new points and ideas you can use in the market.

Some of the things that you have to consider are app layout, features, and functionalities. Look out for other things that stand out or things that you might be missing.

Plan the UX and user journey of the mobile app

The success of mobile apps depends a lot on the User Experience of the app. You have to make sure that your app’s functions align with the users’ desires and expectations. You must plan your User Experience in advance. You can take Instagram as an example and check How to Get on the Instagram Explore Page?

If you don’t plan the app’s user experience, you will not have an idea of how complex the app is. You also will not realize how much time you need to invest in developing the app. In the end, you won’t have something tangible to present during the user testing. Make sure that the users have a low UX resistance with the app. The primary goal here is to ensure that they go from one point to the solution in the most efficient and intuitive possible.

If you don’t take the time to plan the UX before you start to build correctly, your users will likely experience difficulty with their use of the app. Then you would need to spend some more resources and time to fix things.

The significant difference between a successful app and an unsuccessful one is the user experience. Poor user experience can stem from making some avoidable mistakes when building the app. Some of the mistakes to avoid for good user experience are:

● Not understanding the needs of the user

The very foundation for building a good app is understanding what the users need. Having an understanding of your audience is crucial. You have to follow the users’ pain points, how your app is better than your competition, and the interface that is crucial for a beautiful UX.

● Adding too many features

When it’s the first time for developing a mobile app, it might tempt you to add so many features that you think are cool. But this actually relates to a poor user experience most of the time. The features can overwhelm the users and make the users ditch the app.

● Creating poor and confusing navigation

No matter how good the onboarding experience is, if users cannot find what they want with ease, then it is useless. Your app should have clear navigations that makes it easy for even first time users to go to wherever or do whatever they want with it. There are different types of navigation, so you have to choose what you think is the most intuitive for your app. After that, you have to know the essentials that you’ll include in your navigation.

Other mistakes that you can make leading to the poor user experience are

● Neglecting the experience of first-time users.

● Overcrowding the user interface

● Using jargon and terminologies that the users don’t understand.

Launch the app

The last step to creating a mobile app irrespective of the route that you took is to launch the app. Launching the app means that it is done and ready for use. After this, you should be open to user feedback to improve the app with regular updates based on the user experience.

Conclusion

It takes a lot of time, effort, and resource to create a mobile app. So, if you are creating one that outsmarts the opponent, you have to do more. It takes a lot of processes, and we’ve highlighted some of them in this article. Whatever it takes, make sure to put the user experience first. Focus on satisfying them and solving their problems with the app, and you are already halfway to success. These tips will help you find success with your app.