5 Vital Things To Do Before Launching Your App
In software development, things cannot be done by half measures. Products that are incomplete or broken leave a bad taste in customer mouths and provide little to no use to them.
This can harm your revenue and your team’s ability, as people will not trust the quality of your work in future.
These outcomes can be solved though. With the use of this handy list you can ensure that your app launch goes as smoothly as possible.
Bugs
A buggy feature is a broken feature.
Whilst bugs and glitches that you didn’t know about (following extensive quality assurance) are acceptable, app-breaking ones are not. Leaving them in will only sour the user experience and could throw up more issues with other parts of the product if you delay fixing them.
That’s why ‘bug elimination’ needs to be high on your to-do list before the app launch. The sooner you nip them in the bud the better.
Arguably smaller bugs can be dealt with post-release (if they aren’t too much of a problem) but larger issues need to be tackled prior to launch.
Usefulness
Is the feature itself useful and helpful to the user? What can be tweaked to make it so?
Under The Lean Startup Method, we know that you must cater to the needs of early customers in order to be successful. The quality of your app’s features also contributes to that.
For that reason, if the features that you’ve included sound nice but aren’t actually useful, you should alter them before the app launch so that they do. Otherwise you’re just putting together empty code.
Your team should continuously look at other ways in which your features solve problems.
Product Owner Vision
Another important point on your app launch to-do list is whether or not your app’s features are in line with your Product Owner’s vision.
The Product Owner’s vision suggests what outcomes the app has and allows the team to understand what its purpose is. Everything about the app should fall in line with this.
If the features of your app deviate from that vision you need to ask why and how they can be altered to fit in.
Ease of Use
How smooth is the user journey? How difficult it is to use your app?
Improving the usability involves things like buttons not being obvious (or being unclear in what the CTA purpose is), the user journey (how users get from point A to B) and the overall layout and design.
This is something that you should address before the app launch because if the features make it to the final release with clunky, uncomfortable layouts, it will take a great deal of work to fix.
Value
Finally, before your app launches, you should also take into account the value of the app. We’ve covered the value to the user (in terms of usefulness) but you should also think of monetary value for your business.
Not every feature of your app should have the end of goal of making money (this may be off-putting to the user) but some of your features should be built with revenue in mind. Some could work like a funnel, with the aim of channelling users to buying your service or products.
Overall, all of the things I mentioned above are massively important to your app’s success.
An app launch that goes off without a hitch not only increases the trust your customers and clients have, but it also frees up your team to work on improving your app.
