With the arrival of many innovative development trends, the future of mobile and web apps indeed looks brighter than ever in 2021. Many have brilliant ideas but are clueless about how or where to start the process. If this is your first-ever app development initiative, no matter the dimensions and scope of the project, we will help you get to know the one-by-one proven development process/steps from the idea in your mind to launching it to the market for developing a successful application.
Here we go…
Validate the primary need for this application by performing market analysis
The most successful apps in the markets have a motive to solve a particular challenge for the respective end-users. We need to make sure that our application has a demand in the corresponding market in order to make it a successful one.
You can even use some most popular tools like Google Keyword Planner to get an insight into how often certain words are searched and how those searches have changed over time. This can help you narrow down your keyword list to the ones that the end-users really want.
Another way to perform market research is by analyzing the most downloaded apps in the app marketplaces. Downloading them and trying them from a user and stakeholder perspective will help you to:
- Analyzing how each application solves problems similar to the pain points which we have noted
- Analyzing your project idea from different angles based on the user’s priorities
- Exploring the complete potential scope, features, new ideas, designs that are accepted/in demand by the users of the project
- Discover the successful applications in the similar domain
- Finding a point of reference and existing solutions for your blocker use cases(if there are any)
- Defining the market edge of the competitors
- Acceptable best practices for the users in similar areas of interest
- Analyze the competitors and chances for competition
Define an abstract with your app idea
The probable use cases for applications are seemingly endless. From simple websites to applications on different domains like business, e-commerce, health, fitness, social networking, religion, and more, there’s an app for anything you can imagine.
Ideas can be either a completely new one to create a new business from scratch or an enhancement/ extension of your existing business. Keep in mind that a completely new idea out of nothing is very rare, and most ideas are born as variations/combinations of old existing ideas.
A very concise summary of at least the key features required for the idea you have in your mind, either in descriptive form or any informative diagrams, can act as the base of your project from which we can update/enhance the scope accordingly.
Eliminate non – core features
Dividing the features set into the following three categories will help you categorize the features to be deployed in each phase if there are any constraints in time duration or initial budget:
- List of Must-Have Features
- List of Should Have Features
- List of Good/Nice to Have Features
As an initial stage, developing the product with the key features or Minimum Viable Products will attract early-adopter customers and validates the product idea. Removing the features that are not critical to the core functionality of your app will help to reduce the budget and duration of development as well. Examples of features that can be eliminated are the functionalities that possess lots of effort, risk and have a low impact on customer engagement.
Develop rough sketches/wireframes/storyboard
Transforming the business concept which is confined in your mind to a basic/rough layout of visual representation will help a second person to communicate your idea in a better way. A rough layout of at least the key features to be implemented in our project marked even on a piece of paper will do a great help in communicating the idea/goal. And thus the primary reference for the user interface is ready by now.
Once the list of features and their priorities are set, we need to merge the ideas into a clearer picture. A page schematic/screen blueprint will act as a visual guide that represents the skeletal framework of a website by arranging the components to accomplish the desired purpose. While working on the wireframes, it is advisable to create a high-level storyboard with the primary connection between each screen explaining how the user can navigate through your app.
Here at Perfomatix, our UI/UX team will help you to design your ideas and features into a page layout which will be reviewed by our industrial experts and finalized by our clients.
Review and Confirm the scope
Our team of business analysts and technical experts will help you to analyze, review the requirements, provide suggestions on the technical and market aspects, develop and confirm the overall scope.
Once the overall scope is confirmed by the client, our team of technical experts will analyze the scope, come up with the estimation for cost and effort along with the technical details, development methodologies, app analytics, and marketing, and suggest different methods of taking those ideas to bring them to reality. We will be creating UI/UX designs for the project after multiple iterations of discussions with our technical experts and will share that with our clients for their approval. The goal is to concretize your app concept before it goes into the design process! The clearer the prototype from the start, the better.
Wait while we develop, test, and launch your product into the market
With the approved wireframes, storyboards, discussions, suggestions, and signed approvals as the foundation of the project, our team of technical experts will design the process, develop, test, and release your new app to the market.
During the development phase of the SDLC, the system design prototyped/wireframes in the Design Phase will be converted into a working information system that addresses all documented system requirements.
Simultaneous testing, tracking, and fixing bugs will be carried out during the development phase itself to ensure bug-free software. A complete round of in-depth testing happens before releasing the product to the market.
Once approval is issued by the testing experts, the work necessary to deploy the final solution into the target production environments will be initiated where all the steps, processes, and activities that are required to make a software system or update available to its intended users will be carried out. Creating installation guides, system operations, system administration, and end-user functionality as well as a detailed plan for implementing a solution across several environments across the organization. Once an update has been fully tested, it can be deployed to the live environment
Post launching your software to the market, it requires regular maintenance to ensure that the software operates continually at peak performance levels, as requirements and customer needs are always evolving. Throughout the maintenance phase, designers address issues that are discovered to prevent any hindrance to the expected performance of the software or to add increased functionality to the software.
