The 9 steps towards a great app

The first thing we must know about great apps is that It doesn’t requires a lot of resources, money or big teams to be successful. In fact, most of the well-knowed products are developed for few people with huge dose of enthusiasm, love for their product and attention for the details.

It’s weird an app that a big company presents accomplish expectations of the users. Google was great at the beginning and Facebook and many others but, progressively, while a company founded for innovators, adventurers and talented free people is becoming in a bureaucratic and structured company leaded for boards of directions is unavoidable that they begins to accumulate fails and unhappy users. You don’t think so? Maybe you should remember google buzz, wave, plus or the terrific facebook app for Android.

Facebook, Google, Microsoft, … All of these companies collects the best talent of the world. Designers, engineers and marketers among others fight for go inside. Then, why they don’t suprise us with incredible products over and over? I guess the response is “Spirit”.

First: The Spirit

I think is the same Steve Jobs attempted to get in her whole life (a great example is the knowed episode with the pirate flag his team raised in Apple. Jobs always looked for spirit in the apple’s workers.

Today, Apple is one of the biggest companies in incomes worldwide and the macintosh (and OS) he leads with a enthusiastic team with a pirate flag is the leg on which the company holds. Probably, if Jobs didn’t return to Apple in 90's, the company has been solded or destroyed by the bureaucratic people.

Sure, a good manage is needed to the company success but too often managers wants become all in measurable things, with structured (and controlled) procedures and this is the death of the creativity and the broth culture of mediocrity.

So, the first thing any company needs to maintains itself up is spirit.

One of the companies that better understand this philosophy is 37signals.

Second: The vision

Well, we have now our team (or even ourselves), the time and the idea. The most of the technical people I know begins here to draw database schemas, use cases and things like that. I’m convinced that this is one of the biggest errors we could make and this is the main reason I think an engineer (or similar) shouldn’t lead a project.

The technical people always use terms like performance, redundancy and so on. That’s good but not in this phase. Now we need dreams, creativity, a bit of madness, daring to go beyond. We’ll see how later.

At this moment we need a vision that guide us along the development. The vision is the idea of perfection in our app, the whole stuff we want to achieve with it. No matter if we can do it or not or boundaries we have now or in the near future. It’s only a desire.

When the team have a agreement about what they want to achieve is the moment to begin think in how.

Third: Research

We have now a good idea and a team involved with a vision but we don’t know if has sense invest money or time in it. To know if it’s worth carrying it out we need to research the market.

It depends of the resources we have research process will vary but It’s no necessary huge methods or complicated analysis.

Google provides the best method to research necessities, competency and so on in digital industry. Not only its search engine, we have We can talk with our potential costumers with a website and social networks, launch surveys and test real commercial possibilities with a campaign in Kickstarter, Indiegogo or similar platforms.

So, we have a lot of tools to test our idea with no money.

Fourth: Strategy

Is the time for project managers, sales managers, development director, marketers, product designers and board of direction (if they are not ourselves).

In this phase, the business people decide about the investments they are willing to carry out and agree with marketers and sales managers about the best moment to present the product and how to sell it.

With this parameters, the development director and project managers made a plan to assign resources and distribute the time to reach time limit and marketers and sales people devise a marketing plan for introduce the product to the potential customers.

Fifth: Product Design

In this phase, product designers talk with the marketers and UX and UI teams (always, if they are not ourselves) to design the best app as possible, adapted to the different customers.

We could have customers with disabilities, ones from different religions and many other cases designers must have in their minds.

Product designers guide the design process and decide about many things considering the boundaries and expectations spcified in the last phase but exists many steps into this one that requires more specialized knowledge. These are:

While product designers do their job and guide the project, designers carry out tests with users and apply different techniques to achieve the best taxonomy, information architecture and distribution of UI components to get users can use the app naturally.

I think is one of the most important phases in the build process because it save a lot of problems and programming and maintainability time.

Sixth: Coding

Finally, we arrive to the phase where the most apps begins.

In the coding phase, DBAs and developers meets with the designers to decide how designs could be realized.

When they agree the best method to get a version the most close as possible to the designs, DBAs begin to sketch the database configuration and programmers begin to research libraries, draw Use Cases, define UML schemas and, in a ideal world, define a CRUD and an API.

Continuing in our ideal world, frontenders and backenders keep their layers as decoupled as possible and each team work in their issues.

This means frontenders write the HTML, Javascript and CSS and decide how the information appears and are structured, helped with the UX and Accesibility teams while backenders program and interface to access information and make actions communicating the UI and the database.

In this phase also the marketers and analytics team define the KPIs, the strategic indicators we use to measure the success of our app (number of visitors, bounce rate, etc.).

Seventh: Testing

Finally, the app is finished but not ready to the deployment. It’s necessary testing it in real environment. For that, we need to deploy the app as Alpha and Beta testing.

In the Alpha testing process, a few selected users, usually close to the company or its employers, use the app in their daily lives and dicover bugs and things to improve or modify. These things are solved directly, in the case of bugs, or are discusing among the members of the team in the case of processes to improve. They could design anything different or add small modifications.

In the Beta testing process, the app is opened to a larger group of users. It depends of the app, the number can vary from a few hundreds to many thousands but the process is the same that in the Alpha testing.

There are many more testings to ensure the best performance and usability of the app. You can see some of them in the Wikipedia.

During the testing process, normally, marketers and sales team take advantage to introduce the product, create a community around it and generate expectation. This actions are knowed as create hype.

Eighth: Release

Is the time of launch the official release!! Marketers often offer discounts, create contests, send press notes to blogs, diaries, etc. and try to move the community. The objective is rise the number of people speaking about the app.

It’s also the time to see how KPIs go and apply marketing techniques to achieve the objectives.

Ninth: After sales

Our job only begins with the realease of an app. Obviously, it depends of the type of app. If it’s a casual app maybe there isn’t almost exist after sales movement but if it’s a long term app like pinterest, evernote or a game, tasks like support or analysis are vital to the success and rise of the project.

There are three main tasks after sales an app. During the Analysis, the traffic managers and analysts watch over the KPIs and give data reports and advice to marketers with the objective of take actions to achieve the goals. Meanwhile, Community Managers energize the community and receive valuable data about how people use the app, new features users want and many more. Finally, Support team solve doubts, bugs and problems of any kinds.

These are the key actions to retain and rise a community around not only your app but your company, saving much time for your next product.

Conlusion

As you can see, there is a lot of work behind an app but, although I have wrote about teams and different positions, so many people It’s not necessary.

One person or a small team of three people are perfectly ready to accomplish all of these points without problem in a couple of months or even less. It depends what type of app we want build, what resources we have available and how many time we want spend.

We can expand or collapse these phases as we want, spending more or less according our needs and knowledge.

The essence is know the process and try to be orderer and aware of the whole work are behind an app.

Originally published at www.frontdojo.com on January 30, 2014.