As the saying goes, ideas are a dime a dozen, but implementation is what separates good from great. Mobile app design and development is just as important as innovative app concepts. Without the right strategies, your app will never achieve its full potential.

So, which strategies should you be using? We’ve assembled a short list of the most important design and development strategies to help you create a winning app built to last.

Cloud Technology

It seems like every area of technology has been influenced by cloud technology. And mobile application development is no different.

Cloud development is a great way to coordinate with a remote workforce and greatly expand your capabilities without requiring the physical footprint of a large agency behind you. In fact, this flexibility is one of the biggest selling points of the cloud. No one knows what the future holds, so why not embrace a flexible solution that is ready for anything?

As an added bonus, cloud technology can significantly reduce your overhead and overall costs by removing the need to invest in infrastructure. Instead, you can focus most of your resources on making the best possible app.

User Experience

In many ways, the success or failure of an app comes down to two words: “user experience.” Your users will inevitably compare your app to hundreds of others, so you want to dazzle them with a positive experience from the moment they first open it.

The user interface goes a long way towards helping or hurting the user experience. If graphics are cluttered and text is hard to read, then users will soon give up on the entire thing. You only get one chance to make a first impression with new users, so sweating the details of the user experience is critical.

Other user experience factors include connection speeds and overall app performance. Users can ignore the occasional flaw if the overall experience is positive, but a negative overall experience may magnify even the smallest errors.

That’s why it’s important to work with experienced consultants who can optimize the user experience. 

Identify Your Demographic

How, then, do you create a truly stellar user experience? It all starts by determining exactly who your users are.

Some apps are aimed at very young children while others are aimed at experienced world travelers and others still are meant for professionals in an office environment. You need to know who your key demographic is and exactly what this demographic cares about to build a user experience finely tuned to their specific needs.

If you haven’t done so already, it’s worth creating detailed personas for your demographic. This helps your development and marketing team know exactly who to cater to and the exact kind of content they should focus on.

Continuous Engagement

Once upon a time, the key metric of an app’s success was how many times it was downloaded. Now, though, the best metric is actually the continuous engagement of your users.

The best way to do this is to build robust analytics into your app and collect as much data as you can during the initial app deployment. This will give you a better idea of what the most popular features are among your users and help provide a roadmap to what the most important elements are.

From there, you can make additions and tweaks to the existing app to drive continuous engagement. In short, you can boost engagement by giving the people what they want. But without those internal analytics, it’s impossible to know exactly what your users crave.

Solid Marketing

Many developers underestimate the importance of a good marketing plan. If you’re not careful, it’s easy to think of marketing as simply reactive. That is, you create the app and only then figure out how you plan to sell it.

That approach may work if you only want a short-term marketing plan. Such marketing strategies usually involve making a big splash when the app deploys and then counting on word-of-mouth for all future marketing.

In most cases, though, developers want a longterm marketing strategy that helps keep their app on people’s minds. For best results, the marketing team should work hand-in-hand with the development team to craft a multi-channel approach to marketing your app for a minimum of 12 months.

Platform Choice

It’s one thing to make a killer app. It’s another to figure out where you should sell it!

Platform choice is a very important part of your mobile app development process steps. For example, whether your app is released for iPhone, Android, or both largely depends on your resources and your demographics.

If you want to play it safe, it’s best to develop for iPhone in order to reach the most users. At the same time, though, you should consider whether your app should function on the phone, tablet, or both.

It’s tempting to release for as many platforms and devices as your budget allows. However, it’s important to optimize the experience for all users across each platform and device.

Money Matters

Your overall goal is, of course, to make money. But to make as much as possible, you need to create a solid monetization strategy and build your app around that.

The most traditional approach is to give your app a modest price (say, $4.99 or less). This price range can be tempting to many users, but it can also may turn off users who primarily use free apps.

A more popular recent approach is the “freemium” model. In this model, your app is free to download and use. However, you include certain advanced features that users can only unlock by paying for them.

The freemium model has worked well for some companies because they count on a handful of “whales” to buy plenty of extra features, effectively netting more profit than they would via a fixed price.

The final approach involves integrating some form of advertising. This may be overt (featuring ads inside the app) or less obvious (such as giving sponsored rewards to users).

Each of these approaches helps generate additional revenue. However, it’s crucial to integrate such advertising in a way that enhances instead of hurts the user experience.

Mobile App Design and Development: Ready to Roll Out

Now you know some of the best strategies for mobile app design and development. But do you know who can find the best strategies to make your app successful?We specialize in helping developers create apps that will put them on the map. To see what we can do for your own development team, contact us today for a consultation!