How can you build an app that people will simply love? Continue reading to learn more!
As Jeff Bezos, CEO at Amazon, once said, “If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell six friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends.” And he is absolutely right – in today’s increasingly digital world, building a product that provides an unpleasant experience and people don’t enjoy might destroy your business faster than a forest fire.
The same quote is also true when applied to the world of mobile apps. Considering that the number of smartphone users worldwide is estimated to increase to 3.8 billion by 2021 (from 3.5 billion to 2020), there is no doubt that the use of apps (whether mobile, progressive or hybrid) is only going to increase as well.
However, this doesn’t mean that all apps are going to succeed. In fact, a Gartner study revealed that the commercial success of native mobile apps is just a little above 00.01, which means that only 1 of each 10,000 apps will gain enough visibility on the market. But how can you build a successful app that people truly love and want to recommend to their friends and family? How can you make it stand out from the crowd and not let it die out in the app store?
Here are our top tips on how to build an app that actually helps you achieve your business goals:
1. Conduct a survey
Undoubtedly, one of the best ways to build an app that people enjoy and find value in is to ask them directly.
Let’s say that you have a Digital Marketing business and you are planning to establish your mobile presence, but you don’t know where to start. Should you create an app that helps you sell your Marketing services? Or maybe an app that’s focused around content and providing valuable insights to your existing (or new) customers?
The best way to answer these questions and create an app that users want is to ask them directly. You can do that by publishing a poll on your social media channels, or sending them an email with a link to a more comprehensive survey. You can later use this feedback to make a conclusive and well-informed decision.
2. Select the right type of app your business
Once you know what kind of app your audience wants in terms of value, one of the most important decisions that you will have to make for your business is the type of app that you want from a technological perspective.
There are three main types of apps:
- Native mobile apps – the apps that you will typically find in the app store. They usually provide a good user experience and full functionality, but can incur in extremely high costs for development. Besides, distribution can be difficult as you have an extra step between the app and the customer – and that is, the app store.
- Web apps – web apps, and especially in their progressive web app version, behave and look like native mobile apps. However, they are significantly lighter, faster, cheaper, and the best of all – they don’t have to be downloaded from an app store, which means that users can directly access them through a single URL. On top of that, unlike native apps, they are also indexable by search engines.
- Hybrid apps – hybrid apps are a combination between native mobile apps and web apps, incorporating elements from both. In a similar manner to native apps, they can be distributed through an app store, but a single code base makes it possible for them to be available on all the operating systems. They are usually faster to build and don’t require high development costs as native ones, but can be quite limited in functionality.
For more information on the different types of apps, you can visit our article The 3 Types of Apps & Which One to Create For Your Business.
3. Plan your Marketing strategy ahead
Our next tip to build an app that’s going to reach success (and people will love) is to plan your Marketing strategy before you actually begin its development.
This is especially important if you are creating a native mobile app – imagine spending thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars just to find out that your app is difficult to market, or people don’t have an interested in an app like that.
If you need more information on the different Marketing strategies that you can implement to get your app to success, check our article 12 PWA Marketing Strategies That Work.
4. Check your competitors
If you want to build an app that your audience loves, one of the best things that you can do is to make a comprehensive research on your competitors. Do they have a mobile app? What kind of app do they have? What are the features that it offers, and are people are actually engaging with it?
Of course, it can be difficult to get precise engagement data from your competitors. However, you can take a look at the app’s downloads, and check when it was published so you can get an idea of how popular it is. If you have a progressive web app, you can make a backlink analysis with tools like Semrush to check the amount of traffic to the URL.
5. Testing is key
The next tip that will help you build an app that your audience loves and enjoys is to test as much as possible. Testing in mobile app development can be extremely beneficial in order to ensure that everything works nicely.
You can learn more about testing, and the different ways that you can do that depending on the technology and the operating system, in this article: Mobile App Testing Tutorials (A Complete Guide With 30+ Tutorials).
6. Incorporate Offline experience
While the world has become increasingly digital, and you can connect to the Internet no matter if you go to the bar, restaurant, airport, or simply stay at home, we are far from having an excellent Internet connection all the time. In fact, in many cases it won’t work properly, or you will directly not be able to connect.
For this reason, if you want to build an app that users can truly use everywhere, plan to incorporate offline experience. This is a design practice that entrepreneurs and developers should always consider as their plan their apps.
If you build your app with a powerful Drag and Drop Builder such as Beezer, your progressive web app will automatically have offline mode included, allowing it to function even if the connection is unstable – or if there is no connection at all. This is possible thanks to an API called Service worker, which caches important assets and files so that users can access them even if their connection is unreliable.
7. Focus on solving one problem first
A big problem for many companies that want to develop a mobile app is that they try to build a complex product that solves many problems at once. The truth is that aiming to build a hyper advanced and grandiose app since the beginning may lead your app to a failure.
While having a big vision is great, you can build an app that reaches success by taking small, simple, and well-calculated steps. For example, you could start by launching a more basic version of your app, and continue improving it as you get feedback from your users.
8. Make it simple
In the same line of thought as our previous tip on how to build an app, avoid fitting as many features as possible into your application. In their effort to stand out from the crowd, many companies are tempted to pack lots and lots of features that users may not really need, just so that they can say that they have them.
However, simple is always better. Instead of oversaturating your app, select only the most important features that users may need, and focus on user experience instead. How intuitive is your app? Is it easy to navigate through? Is it easy for the user to find the feature that they need? Your design should be intuitive and easy to use, otherwise you may lose your audience quicker than they arrived.
9. Be present on many platforms
Another essential tip in order to build an app that drives more traffic and visibility to your brand is to be present on as many platforms as possible. Of course, if you are trying to achieve that with native app development, it can be extremely expensive – a native app can cost anywhere from $10,000 to $500,000 depending on its complexity and functionality.
If you want to build an app both for Android and iOS, you will need to invest in separate development because they require a different code base. However, don’t get discouraged! You can still build an app for all platforms and operating systems by using a no-code, Drag and Drop builder for progressive web apps.
The beauty of progressive web apps is that they automatically meet all requirements across different platforms simultaneously – which reduces both development and maintenance costs.
10. Avoid extra steps for the users
Next on our list of tips on how to build an app that reaches success is to avoid extra steps for the users as much as possible.
As we mentioned previously, one of the cons of native mobile apps is that they can’t be accessed without a digital distribution system such as the Apple App Store, Google Play, Samsung Galaxy Apps, or Huawei App store, among others. This means that users can’t directly access the app and reach the content that you’ve provided for them – they will have to go to the app store, search for the app, and download it.
Which is not always an easy task – often times, we don’t have enough space on our phones, so we have to take extra time to revise apps or files that we want to remove, and go through the hassle of eliminating them. Which, honestly, can take some time, on top of creating a step that we would rather not go through.
For this reason, one of the benefits of progressive web apps is that they can be accessed with a single URL, without having to go through the extra hassle.
Don’t have an app yet? Start building yours today!
