Creating a mobile app for your business brings a myriad of advantages, helping enhance customer engagement, accessibility, and brand visibility. A mobile app serves as a direct channel to connect with customers, allows your business to leverage push notifications, and bolsters strong customer relationships.
With a mobile app, your business can access more data-driven insights that enable you to personalize experiences and messaging, customize product and service offerings, and maintain a competitive edge over your rivals.
But the stakes are high when it comes to mobile business apps. It’s easy to produce a poor-quality app, but you’d end up losing more than you gain. The mobile app market is packed to the gills, so if your app is glitch-ridden, difficult to use, or confusing, customers will quickly abandon it for an easier alternative.
Once they’ve discovered that your app offers a poor user experience, there’s a risk that they’ll assume the same is true of your website, service channels, and even core product.
Building an app that offers optimal performance and intuitive user experiences can be much harder and time-consuming. Many businesses aren’t sure they want to invest in the stress and headaches of mobile app development. But with the right tips and tactics, you can enjoy the benefits of an effective business mobile app, without tearing your hair out in the process.
1. Define Clear Objectives and Features.
It’s important to outline the specific goals you want to achieve with your app, whether that’s gathering user data, strengthening customer loyalty, or streamlining customer tasks.
Once you know your goals, identify the key features that align with these objectives. Prioritize features based on their importance and feasibility, and avoid getting distracted by nice-to-have add-ons.
Otherwise, there’s a risk that you’ll end up with an abundance of features that your users don’t need, and that can be even more damaging than not having enough features. Instead of finding the functionalities that help them complete their desired actions, users feel overwhelmed by the options, experience “analysis paralysis,” and flee to your competitor’s simpler offering.
2. Choose the Right Development Approach.
Having set your goals and chosen the features that will bring the most value to your users, the next step is to consider what development approach you’ll use: native, hybrid, or web-based app.
Hybrid apps use a single codebase, making them quicker to develop and more cost-effective, but they tend to deliver lower performance and native user experience. Web-based apps are even more straightforward to set up and maintain, but they usually lack features and performance that hybrid and native apps can deliver.
Native apps bring optimal performance and superior user experience, because they use platform-specific functionalities. They are also usually more expensive and time-consuming to produce, because they need separate codebases for each platform, which puts many companies off native apps.
3. Use Your Website as Your App Foundation.
When you build a business mobile app, there’s no need to start from scratch. Your business website probably already contains most, if not all, of the information you need for your app.
The functionalities that visitors use on your website are the same ones you’ll need for your app, and customers will want to complete the same actions that they do on your site through your app.
Moving from website to app is a lot simpler and less stressful than sitting down to plan a mobile app ex nihilo. It can also be far more affordable. Now that you know what you need, and you have the necessary data, it’s a relatively easy task to turn your website features into a user-friendly, high-performance app.
4. Establish Cross-Functional Team Collaboration.
When you turn the process of building a mobile app into a cross-departmental concern, you’ll help cut hassle and improve your end product at the same time. Encourage collaboration between many teams, including design, marketing, and development, to ensure that everyone’s expertise and input are aligned with the overarching objectives of the app.
It’s important to break down silos between departments and foster an environment where cross-functional teams actively engage in discussions and decision-making processes. Everything from user interface design to feature development and marketing strategies should be aligned across the product.
When employees from diverse disciplines share insights, it stimulates innovation and produces a better app that resonates with users and meets business objectives.
5. Begin with an MVP (Minimum Viable Product).
Beginning with a minimum viable product (MVP) helps ensure that your final product is more relevant to user needs. It’s tempting to aim for the moon of your ideal business app, with all the bells and whistles that could potentially improve user experience. But it’s more practical to focus on launching an MVP that holds only the most essential features.
This allows you to expedite the release process, and brings more strategic value. Once your MVP app is on the market, you can collect user feedback and gauge user responses and behavior patterns firsthand.
This feedback loop is crucial for helping you and your developers to understand user preferences, pain points, and needs, facilitating iterative improvements and adjustments based on real user experiences.
6. Adopt an Agile Development Methodology.
If you don’t already use agile methodologies, now is the time to start. Agile working practices involve breaking down the entire app development project into smaller, manageable tasks or iterations known as sprints. This makes it easier to track progress, identify challenges, and adapt to changing circumstances.
Each sprint focuses on specific deliverables for your app, and ends with a period of review, where teams gather insights from stakeholders, users, or testing results.
This helps build user experience into the core of the app, and allows teams to swiftly respond to changes in requirements, technology, or market trends.
7. Embrace Constant Iteration.
The corollary to beginning with an MVP and focusing hard on the essential features is the need to implement constant iteration/constant development (CI/CD) practices. This involves continuously gathering and analyzing feedback on every step of the build, test, and deployment processes.
Once you gain feedback, you implement it into your next updates or adaptations to make sure that the app functionality and design is as effective and enjoyable as possible for your users.
With CI/CD, you can begin with a minimal, bare-bones product, and then continually improve it and add to it so that it’s perfectly aligned with user needs without wasting time and effort on unnecessary features and functionalities.
Build a Business Mobile App Without the Stress
Inevitably, building a whole new business app is going to take some work. But the right approaches and tools can help you achieve your goals without significant headaches or friction. There’s no longer any need to hesitate over unlocking the benefits of a mobile app, just because you’re worried about the work involved.
