Building an application is an endeavor not to be taken lightly. They require large amounts of time, money, and energy. The survival of startups and businesses can revolve around their success. Know what qualities effective applications have and use them as guides when designing and building yours. Here are five that we recommend paying close attention to.
Value
Your application needs to provide some sort of value to your user. If it doesn’t provide some sort of value, there is no reason for a user to use it, keep it around, or download it in the first place. Having a good understanding of who your users are and what challenges they face will allow you to provide a solution that they will find value in. Value can be satisfying a curiosity, streamlining a common action, providing information, entertainment, social interactions, and more.
Engagement
In fact, you want your users to find value in your application over and over again. Sometimes the nature of an application facilitates reuse organically. Users of a remote control application will be brought back to it every time they want to control the hardware it connects to. For others, rewards and promotions drive engagement. Notifications can be leveraged to remind their users to interact with the application after a period of inactivity.
User Experience & Design
Delighting your users through your application’s design and user experience will aid you in your quest to provide your users with recurring value. If your audience struggles to understand how to use your application or they don’t enjoy the experience, they are not going to stick around, and there are other applications in the same space that are more than happy to scoop up your deserters. Use experienced designers and developers who have a in-depth understanding of the platform so that your application will be both intuitive and attractive.
Stability & Performance
You don’t want your users to quit on you, don’t let your app quit on them. If an application is extremely unstable, it may as well not work at all. While users can’t see when an app’s code isn’t well-written, it’s definitely evident when the app randomly crashes, uses too much memory, drains your battery, uses tons of data, and overall just has poor performance. As applications have become larger and more complicated, having a developer who knows how to manage potentially performance inhibiting features such as GPS, media streaming, encryption, and data effectively has become even more important.
Updates
Applications don’t age like a fine wine. You can’t just build them and leave them alone for months or years on end and expect them to perform. Technology is ever-changing and design trends come and go. Letting your application go fallow won’t keep your users coming back. They will find better looking, better performing, and all around newer applications to spend their time on. Not only will an old, out of date application lose current users, it could also repel new ones from even downloading it from the stores.
While the successfulness of a business or application can never be guaranteed, we’ve found some of the most successful apps are valuable to their users, engaging, easy to navigate, great looking, stable, and modern. Take all of these into account when building your application.
Start your application with a knowledgeable and experienced team!
