Seven important elements to be considered in App Development
Okay, so you are developing your awesome app, but have got doubts if it will become popular? Or you might be thinking if people will use it or not?
Whatever is the question, you need clarity on how to make your next app successful. Whether you are building your first app or you have already been deploying apps to the market, hope my article would be of help to you! So, keep reading…
Hold on, before you start your Hello World template, there is some paper work to do before that! So, I’ll be talking about SDLC right? No no, not old school things! Let’s talk better stuff! Sit down and we’ll think of the seven elements to be considered in development.
1. Think of the Value
The first element of your development is probably not the technology stack you are going to work on. You need to define the value of the idea or the app you are going to develop.
The value determination can be understood by doing a clear market research to understand the competition (suppose there is a similar app to yours in the market and how well does it perform), understand the audience, understand their likes and dislikes. It gives an insight on what area you need to work on.
Another value scale is “How useful will my app be?”. To answer this you need to understand the requirements of the people. And the answer lies in determining the Target Audience!
Even if you are him, you ought to think of this element before you make something!
2. Think of the Platform
Now you have a solid ground base on what you need to do, choosing the platform to develop is very important, because your target audience might be Android users and you develop for iOS, you end up giving a face-palm to yourself.
Now you might ask me, this question, “Why not make apps on all platforms and deploy them?”. That’s true! You could actually do it. But again choose platforms based on the value. Your targeted audience would not be iOS users and you are sure no Apple users would need it. But you definitely can have a web version of your app if it makes sense to have one.
3. Think of the Back-end
Now lets get technical. Having a good back-end matters a lot. A good back-end means, it should not cost you a lot, less or no downtime, good security, robust, scalable and of course performance matters!
Apart from this you should be comfortable with using it. You might have to make changes later on after you deploy and this will cost you a lot!
When you choose your back-end you might need a place to keep it running, like a cloud provider. Now there are lot of cloud options available like GCP, Azure, AWS, DigitalOcean are few to mention.
Now a quick tip. If you don’t want to worry about maintaining your service infrastructure, then consider looking at Docker and Kubernetes.
4. Think of the UI/UX
After making wonders, things does narrow down to the User Experience. If the UI is attractive and graphical, but not usable then you are doomed! There are certain things to consider when creating your UI.
First thing is the design. What kind of design are you using. It will change for each type of app you are working on. Do not confuse between design and the theme. Design is simply the look and feel of the layout, while theme is the arrangement and style of the components.
Next is the theme itself. Make sure to follow the same theme across the entire app.
This is an example of a good theme. Here we are not talking about the design but we are talking about the theme. The color scheme, font style, size, icons are all the same across different screens of the same app. This actually makes user feel comfortable when navigating across the app.
Another thing to be considered in UX is controls and flexibility. Provide proper navigation and easy access to commonly used elements and also provide information to user as in what to do, like in the above example of Truecaller interface, the first screen, gives instructions to user that you need to swipe up to answer the call. Although that swipe up indicator is more than enough, it is a way of making the user comfortable.
Final important thing to be considered is animations. Make sure they are not overused or underused. Also the animations should be smooth making the user enjoy the candy! You can read about animations in this blog by Vernon Joyce
There are various other UI/UX aspects. I have covered the most important ones here.
5. Think of the Security
This is where I could actually talk a lot! Alright so, when you deploy your app and many people are going to use it and it becomes famous. Well let’s keep the “famous” tag aside, because this element is essential for anyone providing some sort of service or product.
Basic things to consider is to make sure to keep your user data confidential. Make sure your app complies to the policies and regulations. Suppose you make a medical diagnostic app, then the medical details should be carefully handled and obviously deserves security.
If your app has to communicate with the server to transfer data, then use encrypted channels. Also use only the right amount of in app permissions.
Your code needs to be free of bugs and vulnerabilities. Make sure to sanitize all user inputs. Consider reading OWASP guides on Vulnerability and Attacks.
6. Think of the Versions
So when you release your app to the market it becomes the 1st version of your app and you cannot make changes to that version. If you want to make any changes then you need to make your next release as updates.
Include what is needed for your 1st version to become a hit. You will have a set of TODO things for your future releases, so they fall under feature releases and in case you need to fix something they are called maintenance releases and if you are fixing some bugs then its called a patch.
All these will need version numbers, and managing this will become so tough. Consider using a VCS like GitHub.
7. Think of ROI
Final element is ROI (Return On Investment). Actually this element correlates to the first element. So what does ROI mean to you and your app?
The reason why the value indicator and ROI go together is because you need to be clear of the objectives and metrics which we do find out through some research to analyze the value. ROI is all about getting back how much ever you invest in your app development. But do I need to care about ROI?
There might be various costs involved like implementation costs, infrastructure costs, integration costs, API calls costs, and many more. Considering all that you need to have an idea of how much ROI will you have, it helps you move forward in the right direction without getting lost in the middle.
So, that is the end of the blog and thanks for taking your time to read my blog. You could definitely put down your appreciation by clapping as long as you like! It encourages me write more blogs! 😉
So let me end by quoting,
“First, solve the problem. Then, write the code” — John Johnson
