The Secrets Behind Successful Mobile App Building

With the continuously growing traction in smartphone usage, businesses around the globe are looking for ways to capitalize on the high-potential mobile app market. From increasing their customer base to building stronger connections with existing customers, leveraging mobile apps is a seamless avenue for businesses to grow and strengthen their offerings.

However, despite the growing usage of mobile apps, many platforms end up failing lamentably. A visit to any major app store will show hundreds of poorly-performing apps with only a few downloads while a select few thrive from millions of users.

For businesses that decide to venture into an app-building journey of their own, that brings up two equally important points.

First, they need to know how to make an app – from idea to execution, and second, which strategies to employ to bring a successful app to market. Below we’ve listed four qualities that separate successful business apps from their unsuccessful counterparts.

Create a Clear Customer Journey

Knowing what your app is supposed to achieve is naturally one of the first steps in app creation. You come up with an idea, and you need to find a way to make it come to life. What will make that idea successful, however, is mapping out exactly how to get your customers from point A to point B and, eventually, to the last step in their customer journey.

A deep insight into the digital space can help developers to create a user interface and user-friendly design that will not only allow the app to serve its purpose but also give the user a hassle-free experience.

A clean design, instructional language, and simple steps will help the customer reach their preferred destination and keep them engaged in the process. The more clutter and ambiguity you create for the user, the more likely they are to abandon their journey.

Listen to the User

When you map out the customer journey, you need to do it with the user in mind. To begin with, what they need, but also what their preferences are. The same mindset will apply to all aspects of design, development, and marketing. To tap into the user’s mind, you should do extensive research and consider testing your app with your target customers.

Getting feedback from users will give you an idea about which bugs to fix and where to tweak the features, but ultimately every user will have their personal preferences. You can add personalized options like editing the design, choosing privacy settings, and having your personal history with the app available at any point in time.

The more they can design their own experience, the more they will want to engage with your app.

Test Performance

Present-day consumers are tech-savvy and mobile-first users who have slim to zero patience for bad mobile experiences. About 56 percent of users uninstall apps within the first week of usage, with as much as 23 percent performing the action within 24 hours. That said, anticipating any performance issues with the app can help prevent such a quick turnaround.

If you have a simple onboarding process and a fast loading time, then you’re already on a solid start to getting the user interested. But further than that, you should ensure that all user-performed actions don’t take a long time, have a clear consequence, and are easily accessible.

Before rolling out the app to market, make sure you do enough test runs to report and fix any performance issues and improve the usability to a fault.

Turn Your App Into a Community

To achieve better user engagement, you can introduce social features or generally make your users feel like part of a community, which works in different ways for different industries. For example, you can create communication opportunities with activity feeds or in-app chats where users can share their experiences or view the progress of others.

For apps where such features don’t fit the purpose of the platform, adding options like reviews or ratings can help the user see input from other customers. You can also send messages like welcome notes, product updates, and reminders via push notifications.

Final Words

In the competitive mobile app landscape of today, creating a successful app requires more than an idea and a team of experienced developers. To build upon that, you should create a clear customer journey, listen to the user, test the performance, and figure out ways to turn your app into a community.

The first version of the app may not include all of these, but testing and editing will ultimately help you reach your optimal level of usability and engagement – helping your mobile app thrive.