Do you have a superb app idea? Do you aspire to build a great app product? Do you want to build the next Uber or Airbnb by pursuing this idea? Wait, remember it is still just an idea. But for that matter, every great business starts with an idea. The moral of the story is, you need to pursue the app idea to succeed with appropriate development and design inputs.
Every app niche is overpopulated with too many apps. Since the entire business world irrespective of size and niches are embracing mobile apps for branding and business conversion, the competition is continuing to increase. So, how can you build a mobile app that stands out from the competition in the years to come? Before you hire app developers for your next project, let us explain the best practices and principles to help your app stand ahead of the competition.
Focus on a small niche
Since every niche is over-saturated with too many apps, you need to choose a smaller and precise niche that perfectly describes your business. It is more like focusing on more articulated long-tail keywords to find content instead of searching with a broader keyword. Once you have chosen the right niche that best describes your app, you can target the audience and shape the app accordingly.
Carrying out Audience Research
The first and foremost principle for app success is to know your audience, as meticulously and extensively as possible. Do you need to know who are the people who need an app like that yours?
Once you have a rough idea about this target audience, you need to go further deeper and know their demographic attributes, gender, age, preferences, buying habits, and other factors. For this, you should create a user persona that best describes the ideal user of your app,
Do Market Research
However unique an app you develop, it is not going to be the only app in your niche. There must be several ones already representing the same niche and app category. You need to know about these competitor apps and their strengths and weaknesses. You also need to know the key reasons users prefer some of these apps and their shortcomings that make users dislike some of them.
When you have finished researching these competitor apps, it becomes easier for you to plan the required value propositions and user experience attributes to target the audience. Most importantly, thanks to extensive market research you can create an app that does everything perfectly to satisfy users and outshine the competition.
Give importance to Personalization
Since smartphone devices are personal in nature and people access them every now and then for expressing all their wants and preferences, they like to be addressed in a personalized manner by the apps as well. There are many personalized ways to make your users feel attached to the app. Let's mention below a few of them.
- Personalized push notifications give users the freedom to choose the types and timing of messages.
- Hiding content that users detest and showing content that users prefer more.
- Providing content and shopping choices based on user preferences and feedback.
- Allowing users to choose certain app features and menu options based upon their preferences and frequency of usage.
- Offering marketing incentives to users based on personalized preferences and triggers.
- Product and content recommendations based on certain triggers based on user behavior and preferences.
Well articulated app architecture
The fundamental ground of developing digital products, including mobile apps is referred to as information architecture. While there is no universal formula to create a powerful information infrastructure, there are several best practices that developers can follow.
Today's information architecture deserves to be simple and straightforward to reduce complexity and cognitive load to a minimum. The emergence of Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is a great example of how you can start small and with basic elements and develop the app continuously through value additions based on user feedback.
Focusing on data security
An app ensures optimum data security and stability simply by ensuring great quality of coding. Most of the cyber security threats take advantage of coding errors and bad coding practices. Since data security is of paramount importance to establish trustworthiness for an app, you cannot leave anything less tried to boost security measures.
Rich User Experience
Users generally prefer switching to an app from a website of the same brand because of the superior user experience. Naturally, this is one area that remains uncompromising. An app must be intuitive enough to allow effortless interactions and access to important features and content. To make this possible the app also should reduce the visual clutter and cognitive load to a minimum.
Most satisfactory app user experience tends to focus on the ease of use and effortlessness of carrying out desired actions. These two aspects should be at the center of attention for your app UX/UI design. An app basically appears as a practical solution to living problems and hence you need to help users get things fine at the quickest possible time.
Lastly, it is important to build an interface that instantly grabs attention and impresses with simplicity and ease of interactions. Give attention also to the fluid and effortless app onboarding experience to make the first-time users return to the app frequently and often.
Extreme priority to testing
Small errors can ruin the entire development effort put in an app project. An app with bugs and coding errors that crashes frequently will not make any positive impression however rich a user experience you have created for your audience. This is why an app must go through several different layers of QA testing before it hits the marketplace.
Conclusion
It is rather simple and easy to stand out from the competition if you can build an app following the tried and tested best practices and principles. It is not the trending technologies that make any difference to the app user experience anymore. It is how easily and effectively your app helps users with a real-life solution that makes the real difference.
Author Bio
Vincent Martinot is a Managing Director of EurecaApps a Mobile App Development Company in Belgium that is developing apps With quality service in the mobile app development domain. He also shares his knowledge of mobile development, new technology & business development by contributing to different online platforms.
