Creating an app for your business can open up limitless opportunities. Make sure you take a look at this guide to learn how to build a web app.
It’s no secret that the digital age changed how businesses advertise themselves or conduct their services. Simply having a website won’t cut it anymore; there are over 1.5 million live websites after all.
If you want to be more accessible to your customers, a mobile app is your best bet. But without prior technological experience, you won’t have the expertise to do it.
Don’t dismiss the idea yet.
With this guide, you’ll learn how to build a web app for your business. That way, you’ll have a better way of serving your customer base. Read on and find out how.
1. Think About What Your Mobile App Does
There are over 2.6 million apps on the Google Play Store. The market’s saturation of apps can make it difficult to stand out. That’s why before you make an app, think about the reason for its creation.
Your planning becomes convoluted without a clear goal. That’s why you must know how the app can satisfy your ideal users’ goals and your business goal.
Boil it down to one concept.
Look at your audience and observe how they interact with your business. Whether it’s online or offline, they will ask how your business benefits them. If they see no immediate advantages, they will move on and search for another that can.
That holds true for your mobile app too. That’s why when making one, think about how the app can increase your ROI. It must make customers come back for more and improve your business’s productivity while decreasing expenses and improve both your social proof and brand awareness.
A Deeper Approach on How to Build an App With Goals
With the basics covered, you must go deeper and realize that your app can serve multiple purposes. Any of these should benefit you, your target users, or both parties. Sometimes, thinking about what your app does will let you discover ways to improve certain business areas.
With this, you must assess how the mobile app affects the problem and its potential result. While doing this, you can also research your market and competitors. This includes time and budget constraints.
2. Enumerate Your App’s Features and Functionality
With a clear idea of your desired goals, you can now think about your app’s scope. Get your creative juices going and write every possible functionality and feature needed on your app. They must be in line with your solutions and results.
Here are examples of features you can use as a starting point:
• eCommerce
• Forms
• Chat
• Social sharing
• Push notifications
Don’t limit yourself with these features. Write down any feature that makes your app more valuable and let it guide you through the development process. You can also check out this blog post if you want more information about mobile applications for business.
3. Look at Your App Competitors
Having a clear idea of what your app is capable pf allows you to advance to the next step: competitor research. It means checking out successful competitors and discovering how they lead their customers to achieve their goals.
Never limit yourself to the local competition. Look at other companies within the same industry around your country or even globally. This will help ignite ideas and help you find market gaps you can take advantage of.
Look at your competitors’ features, layouts, and functionalities. Note down anything that leaves a strong impression on you. Also, look for things that you think are missing on your original app design.
4. Wireframe Your Apps and Make Your Use Cases
The previous steps enabled you to define your app’s goals and functionalities while getting insight into your target market and competitors. With this step, your app will get its first framework, enabling you to use wireframing to piece these blocks together.
The wireframing method is a visual guide representing the layout of your proposed app. It also shows the flow between the screen without visual design and graphic elements to distract you. It serves to bridge your unrefined thoughts and your final product before anything technical starts.
Your app’s use cases will drive your wireframing efforts, with the small things your users can accomplish within your app taking the spotlight. Use this phase to understand the use cases and their supporting thought processes. Think about the optimal number of screens and the flow of screens to finish each goal.
This process also allows you to make various screen flows to find the best one for both your goals and your users’. With this, you’ll save hundreds of hours in development later on down the line. The simplest method is to use a blank paper and pen and make your wireframe by using sketches.
5. Put Your App Wireframes to the Test
With a visual representation for your use cases, test your app’s flow to gauge its user experience. This enables you to analyze the effectiveness of your use cases. It will show possible friction points and put your mobile app processes to the test.
Here, you’ll compare your users’ expectations with your screen’s flow. That way, you prevent any frustrations that draw away their experience. Take note, 80% of businesses fail within 18 months, so you must do your utmost to prevent this from happening.
You can use tools to test your wireframes and use cases to make them interactive. Some of these enable you to connect the screens and link actions as a simulation of your app experience. This is better when sharing your project with your coworkers or customers since they have a better idea of how intuitive your app is from start to finish.
After they test the app, ask them several questions to gauge its viability. Talk about whether the main menu access is obvious after opening the app. Check if they can identify all possible tasks the app offers.
Their feedback will determine how you proceed with the next step.
6. Use Feedback to Revise the App
Group all the feedback according to their similar traits. For example, group all feedback concerning redundant app options. Some customers might tell you that they often return to previous screens to accomplish tasks, so list all possible reasons.
Sort through the feedback and build your checklist for revisions and updates for your wireframe. Make the changes and test them again to ensure the elimination of friction points. You can only go through the next major step once you’re satisfied with the feedback.
7. Pick the Appropriate App Development Path
This is the actual app-building stage of your development. To kickstart it, you must choose the right development path. It means picking either the right programming language for app coding or using a mobile app building platform.
Depending on your budget timeline, this decision can change. If you have less than $10,000 for the budget, use a mobile app building platform. If you have less than $50,000 and six months, use a mobile app framework.
For projects with over $50,000 in budget and six months of development, you can build apps from scratch, regardless of whether it’s for native iOS or Android. This is a brilliant option, but it will cost more and take longer to develop with higher maintenance costs.
8. Build the Mobile App
This is the actual starting point of your ongoing work in collaboration with designers and developers. It doesn’t matter whether you build it from scratch or use a mobile app framework. Either way, your ideas and wireframes will become reality as long as you track each step to bring consistency between the product and your vision.
9. Test the Live App
The next step is to test the app in the real world. This guarantees that your user experience remains intuitive while finding possible bugs. For most apps, you’ll most likely have ten cycles of testing, whether it’s internal or external.
The former means involving yourself and your development team, testing the app like you’re the users. The goal is bug identification and user experience assessment. In simpler terms, this determines whether the app’s workflow is as intended.
The latter will involve people you aren’t acquainted with. They also have no idea how your mobile app works. The primary objective for this step is to discover problems with the user experience and adjust less-intuitive steps.
10. Launch the App
This is the final task on how to build an app. Submit the app to your app store of choice, ensuring that it follows all guidelines enforced by the platform. Draw attention to it once it goes live, which you can do by either updating your website, emailing your customers, or promoting the app on your social media platforms.
Now You Know How to Build a Web App
These are the steps necessary for how to build a web app for your business. Use these steps to learn how to build a mobile app you can be proud of.
Did our guide help you learn about creating a web app? Do you want more tech guides like this one? If so, read our other posts and learn more useful tips and tricks to improve your business through technology today.
