How to Create an App That Your Audience Will Love

Questions You Should Ask Yourself Before You Make an App

In a world of smart­phones and mobile users, cre­at­ing an app is one of the best deci­sions you can make. Any­one can cre­ate an app today. The code may make you uneasy, but you don’t have to code your app your­self.

Before we take a more in-depth look at how to make an app, you have to fig­ure out what type of app you want to build. The fol­low­ing six essen­tial ques­tions can help you clar­i­fy your objec­tives.

Who does my app target?

Your site audi­ence, your exist­ing cus­tomers, con­sumers in your cat­e­go­ry, or some­one else? When you cre­ate an app, you often want as many peo­ple as pos­si­ble using it. How­ev­er, you must first decide who your users actu­al­ly are.

What is the purpose of my app?

What prob­lem does it solve? Will it pro­vide valu­able infor­ma­tion? Will it enter­tain? Sell prod­ucts directly?Create
engage­ment? Raise brand aware­ness? Or per­haps you’re won­der­ing how to make an app that offers sev­er­al of these solu­tions at the same time.

What platform should I develop my app for?

Ide­al­ly, your app should be avail­able on all the major mobile plat­forms, includ­ing iOS, Android, and Win­dows Phone. But to cre­ate an app for all plat­forms, high­er risk, devel­op­ment and main­te­nance costs are involved. In one of the worst cas­es, you might build for all plat­forms only to lat­er find out that 90% of your cus­tomers use iOS.

What features do I want in my app?

When you make an app, it’s impor­tant to make the dis­tinc­tion between the fea­tures you want your app to have, and the fea­tures your app actu­al­ly needs. It’s sel­dom pos­si­ble to imple­ment into your app all the fea­tures you come up with. Instead, you must iden­ti­fy those that can real­ly make a dif­fer­ence, in light of the apps that are already avail­able. Essen­tial­ly when you cre­ate an app, rev­enue gen­er­at­ing fea­tures should be treat­ed as “must-haves” while non-rev­enue gen­er­at­ing fea­tures are “nice-haves”. Great apps aren’t nec­es­sar­i­ly orig­i­nal — they just work real­ly well.

Who will build my app?

You can build it your­self with­out any pro­gram­ming expe­ri­ence using visu­al app builders and oth­er tools. You can also hire free­lance devel­op­ers or a mobile app stu­dio who knows how to make an app for you. App builders come with tech­ni­cal lim­i­ta­tions — make sure to hire the pros that can cov­er you from the design, devel­op­ment, and dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing phas­es of the process.

How much can I spend on app development?

If some­one else is teach­ing you how to make an app, you should know the max­i­mum bud­get you have avail­able. This can help you find an opti­mal bal­ance between cost and fea­tures. Depend­ing on the require­ments and tal­ent of your team, apps can cost any­where from $10–100k!

How to Create an App Using a 3-Stage Process

The devel­op­ment of an app comes with three phas­es. In the UI/UX Design phase, you focus on the actu­al user inter­face and expe­ri­ence — how your app will look and flow for the end user. The sec­ond phase is for back­end devel­op­ment, or the cod­ing behind the inter­face that gives your app its func­tion­al­i­ty. The last phase involves dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing, or the pro­mo­tion of your site on social media and oth­er dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing chan­nels. Each of these phas­es are crit­i­cal to the suc­cess of your app — any missed step could have extreme­ly detri­men­tal effects.

Once you under­stand this, you can actu­al­ly start to make an app and move to the first phase of the process.

How to Make an App Stage #1 — UI/UX Design

The UI/UX design is what app users see. It includes the inter­face with all its visu­al ele­ments, includ­ing but­tons, con­tent areas, dif­fer­ent pages and lay­outs, and set­tings pages. To make an app that peo­ple will enjoy using, you have to cre­ate a UI/UX design that is delight­ful, intu­itive, and friend­ly.

How to Make an App Wireframe

When you’re try­ing to decide how to cre­ate an app, you start with a pen­cil and paper sketch of the base lay­out. In app devel­op­ment terms, this is called a wire­frame. A wire­frame is essen­tial­ly a sto­ry board. You can use wire­fram­ing web-based tools, or ask your app devel­op­er to cre­ate a wire­frame for you.

Every key visu­al ele­ment of your app should make it into the wire­frame. At its most basic lev­el, the wire­frame can be a PDF file. Each page can rep­re­sent an ele­ment of your inter­face, and their order mim­ics the flow of the inter­face. If your app fea­tures a land­scape mode as well as a por­trait mode, the wire­frame should include that.

When work­ing with a devel­op­er who knows how to cre­ate an app, they absolute­ly must share the wire­frame with you. This gives you the chance to add feed­back to the wire­frame and make changes to the design to improve the user expe­ri­ence.

UI/UX Design Best Practices

• Use a lay­out that fits the screen of the device. Users should see the con­tent with­out hav­ing to zoom in or scroll.
• Keep your lay­out orga­nized by plac­ing con­trols close to the con­tent they mod­i­fy. For exam­ple, if one of your apps fea­tures vari­ables that can be edit­ed, such as weight, height, or age, place the edit but­ton next to each of these, where it’s easy to find.
• Make but­tons and con­trols at least 44 x 44 pix­els. Small but­tons can be hard to tap and can frus­trate users.
• Make text size at least 16 px so it’s leg­i­ble with­out zoom­ing.
• Cre­ate a con­trast between back­ground col­or and font col­or.
• Use line spac­ing to improve text leg­i­bil­i­ty. Ide­al­ly, the lines of text in your app shouldn’t over­lap like the lines in this arti­cle.
• Use high-res­o­lu­tion images to make your app sharp on Apple’s Reti­na dis­play and oth­er com­pa­ra­ble high-qual­i­ty device screens.

How to Create an App Prototype

Going a step fur­ther, it’s always good to know how to cre­ate an app pro­to­type. A pro­to­type is a sim­u­la­tion of the app used to test its flow. A pro­to­type doesn’t have to include any fea­tures, only the inter­face and a demon­stra­tion of how the app will work. It can tell you whether your app moves smooth­ly and if its fea­tures are intu­itive and easy to access.

Hav­ing a sol­id pro­to­type in hand is cru­cial as it can save you more mon­ey in the long term. By help­ing you iden­ti­fy design issues big and small before they are built into the app, pro­to­types save you seri­ous mon­ey on redesigns lat­er on. They also allow you to eas­i­ly test if new fea­tures are easy to use or want­ed enough by the end user before invest­ing devel­op­ment resources into them. Last­ly, hav­ing a pro­to­type ensures your devel­op­ers build exact­ly what you want and leaves no error for mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tion — it saves both par­ties their time and mon­ey.

How to Make an App Stage #2 — Backend Development

The back­end is the tech­ni­cal side of your app, where all the parts are assem­bled togeth­er and con­nect­ed to make the UI/UX fea­tures pos­si­ble. It’s hid­den from users, but real­ly makes your app what it is. Back­end devel­op­ment soft­ware lan­guages include Python, Ruby, SQL, PHP, and Mon­go while pop­u­lar front end lan­guages include Swift and Java.

The back­end access­es the infor­ma­tion users need, com­bines and trans­forms that infor­ma­tion, and returns the new rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion in the form of your user inter­face. When a user clicks on some fea­ture in your app and your app per­forms an action, it’s because the back­end cal­cu­la­tions and log­ics take place.

After you have an app pro­to­type you are hap­py with, you can move on to back­end devel­op­ment. This means cre­at­ing a serv­er, APIs, and data dia­grams. To cre­ate an app that uses dynam­ic web-based data, you usu­al­ly have to set up a serv­er and cre­ate app archi­tec­ture for it. Even if your app will work offline, some sort of data­base is often nec­es­sary for logins, user data, new con­tent, and such. The mech­a­nism behind this is fair­ly sim­ple:

1. A serv­er receives user infor­ma­tion
2. Cal­cu­la­tions are per­formed based on that infor­ma­tion
3. Users are pro­vid­ed with con­tent, infor­ma­tion, or actions that are rel­e­vant to their actions in the app

If you want to make an app with a robust back­end, you have two options. Use a plat­form that helps you to do it, like Google Fire­base, or hire an app devel­op­er to build the back­end from scratch. This is a process that requires a sol­id back­ground in cod­ing. While it’s pos­si­ble to cre­ate an app back­end on your own, app cre­ators usu­al­ly get some­one to do it for them.

A good back­end for your app must be scal­able, secure, and robust. It should keep work­ing dur­ing unex­pect­ed sit­u­a­tions, like inten­sive usage or crash­es. That calls for exten­sive test­ing and adjust­ing of the code. It’s yet anoth­er rea­son to work with a pro­fes­sion­al app devel­op­er.

When you make an app, it’s impor­tant to remem­ber that the best apps are the ones that adapt to the user. An adap­tive app includes time- and loca­tion-sen­si­tive con­tent.

How to Make an App Stage #3 — Digital Marketing

Once you’ve fig­ured out how to cre­ate an app and pub­lished it in the App Store and on Google Play, you should mar­ket it. I mean… who cares about your app if they can’t find it or know it exists? While app stores enable dis­cov­ery and expo­sure for your app, you have to spread the word to increase down­loads.

You may have noticed already that many of the world’s most pop­u­lar apps are adver­tised on app stores and beyond. Even when that mar­ket­ing doesn’t direct­ly increase down­loads, it does cre­ate a sense of famil­iar­i­ty which makes peo­ple like­ly to check your app when they hear about it.

Digital marketing for apps come in many forms and sizes, and you should embrace as many of them as you can.

• Talk about your app on your blog and web­site.
• Cre­ate an app Face­book page and post on it updates on new fea­tures and bug fix­es. Post con­tent about cool things peo­ple can do with your app.
• Uti­lize Twit­ter, Insta­gram, and YouTube con­tent to intro­duce users to your app.
• Lever­age Face­book Ads to pro­mote your app.
• Use Google AdWords to make it eas­i­er for web search­es to find your app.
• Invite tech blog­gers to review your app on their blogs.
• Orga­nize social media con­tests fea­tur­ing your apps.
• Make an ani­mat­ed app explain­er video and post it on your home­page instead of text.
• Encour­age users to share your app with­in it using incen­tives like in-app items, bonus points, and such.

Using dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing after you make an app isn’t just option­al — it’s nec­es­sary for your app to sur­vive in com­pet­i­tive app stores. Spread­ing the word through all avail­able chan­nels is espe­cial­ly impor­tant for paid apps, or apps that fea­ture in-app pur­chas­es.

In most cat­e­gories, these apps face stiff com­pe­ti­tion from free apps. Unless you high­light the con­crete ben­e­fits of your app, your rat­ing alone may not be enough to bring in users.

Now that you know how to cre­ate an app, remem­ber that app build­ing is a scal­able process. You can start with a sim­ple app and add fea­tures to it over time. When built right, apps are amaz­ing­ly scal­able. That allows you to release fea­tures at the right pace, and not waste time build­ing fea­tures nobody wants. If you don’t have the resources to build an app your­self, make sure you choose a devel­op­er with a proven track record. That can make all the dif­fer­ence. If you’re ready to take the next step and get start­ed, email hello@swiftlydigital.com today.

Also pub­lished on Medi­um.