Mobile applications have become an increasingly popular trend, but creating one that stands out can be challenging in an already crowded marketplace. Here are the best practices for developing a successful and user-friendly app.
Use tools such as mood boards to ensure designers and developers remain on the same page when creating designs, features, and functionality. This will speed up the creation process while decreasing chances of having to make multiple changes later.
- Focus on UX
User experience (UX) is one of the cornerstones of mobile app development. Users expect an engaging, smooth, and simple user journey that is simple to navigate and responds well to their actions – creating a mobile app that meets this expectation is key to maintaining customer loyalty and maintaining customer engagement.
As part of an app’s strategy for building trust and strengthening brand identity, its visual consistency must remain uniform across its entirety. To accomplish this, implement design patterns and layouts that adhere to both iOS and Android platform guidelines.
Prioritize fast interactions and reduce friction by designing an intuitive onboarding experience for users to access key features quickly and seamlessly. Optimize performance by shortening loading times and eliminating unnecessary animations or graphics that bog down performance.
- Optimize App Load Time
App performance is crucial to user retention and satisfaction. Users expect apps to load quickly and respond immediately; slow app loading times lead to frustration and abandonment.
Optimizing app load time requires multiple strategies, such as server optimization, compression, caching and media/image content optimization. Caching reduces server requests to improve responsiveness and app speed overall.
Images and media content often contribute to slow load times. To speed things up, consider compressing images without compromising their quality or using innovative image formats such as WebP. Lazy loading also reduces initial load times and should be considered when managing performance issues.
- Invest in Security
Brands rely on mobile apps to collect customer information and offer tailored experiences for their target market, yet hackers are constantly looking for ways to compromise such apps and steal sensitive data for nefarious use.
Security must be of primary concern for mobile app developers. Attackers often take advantage of unprotected code to infiltrate apps for nefarious purposes and exploit weaknesses within them to compromise them.
To protect your app, consider including features like code obfuscation and secure data transmission to enhance security. That way, even if attackers gain access to its code, they won’t be able to decipher it easily and encryption ensures that information sent will only ever reach its intended recipient – not malicious third parties.
- Create a Product Roadmap
Product roadmaps provide a tool to turn strategic vision into actionable deliverables when building mobile apps, and allow teams to prioritize features based on research, data, and feedback collected via tools like Pendo Listen. In turn, this ensures features align with business goals while meeting user pain points through features that meet these criteria.
Prioritizing features can be done in many different ways, but prioritizing those which will have the greatest effect on your business objectives is key to successful development efforts. Furthermore, planning ahead can help identify dependencies between features to help ensure all development efforts focus on providing high-impact features and quality apps to users.
- Plan Regular Updates and Improvements
As new technologies emerge, mobile app developers must stay abreast of updates to their applications. Failing to do so could put apps at risk for security breaches and compromise their reputation in an already competitive market.
Updates are important because users expect an optimal experience when using their apps, and provide an opportunity for developers to address bugs or performance issues.
Balance the costs and value of updates against their impact on user experience, keeping track of customer support, user feedback and performance metrics to determine an optimum update frequency for your mobile app. Once determined, updates should be implemented with maximum competitive edge to remain successful and relevant for its target user group.
- Listen to Your Users
Users have certain expectations about how apps should function, and those that fail to meet those standards can lead to frustration among customers and lead them away from using that app in future. This could eventually cause churn.
Utilizing NPS (Net Promoter Score) tools can give insight into your audience’s satisfaction with their mobile experience and enable you to identify problem areas within the UX for improvement, helping increase retention and growth.
Provide multiple channels for users to voice their opinions and submit questions directly to your team. Not only will this foster greater trust between audiences and teams, but it will help avoid miscommunication between staff members as well as ensure no insight goes unnoticed – also speeding up response time to user inquiries.