Six steps to a successful mobile app

Building a mobile app is hard work. Building a successful mobile app is harder still. The following post will explore a number of steps that should be taken to increase the chance your mobile app project is a successful one.

1. Define what success looks like.

What does it mean to build a successful app? The answer to this questions is unique to each project. It is naive to simply measure an app’s success by how many users or downloads it has or how much revenue it generates. There are so many reasons to build an app for a commercial project that do not include growing a large user base at all costs. It is important that you know your apps reason.

Once you know your apps reason for existing, come up with some metrics that will help you understand if and when your app is full-filling its destiny. Call these success metrics if you will.

For example…let’s say you are building an app that will help your customers install and manage your main (non-app) product. Your app’s reason for existing is very clear in this case…install the product. What are some success metrics that can help you understand if the app is successful in its quest? Number of successful installs? Number of install related support tickets opened? A good rating on a post install customer satisfaction survey?

These are all valid metrics. The important point here is to know why your app exists, what success looks like, and how to measure it.

2. Know who your users are.

Successful apps are rarely built for everyone. Instead they have a targeted select audience in mind. What is your apps select target audience? If you don’t know or if you find yourself thinking too broadly (ie. everyone with a mobile phone!) you are falling into a fallacy. You can’t build a good app for everyone. What is good for one user is not for another. Attempting to satisfy everyone’s needs is a sure way to failure. Especially with a mobile application focused and targeted feature sets are of key importance in the usability, desirability and ultimate success of your app.

What is the age group of your target users? What is their technical proficiency? What are their needs and desires? Why would they download your app? What would make them like your app and want to use it again and again?

Take Snapchat as an example. It is a social video based app targeted at the younger demographic. Any ‘adult’ who tries to interact with the app’s user interface is quickly confused and leaves to never return. When Snapchat listened to these non-target users and tried to change its interface to a more generally friendly one, its core target user base revolted. They like the app just the way it was. Attempting to change the app to a more generic design would surely be a mistake albeit hindsight is 20/20.

3. Pay attention to design.

If one factor defines this generation of successful apps it would have to be Design (with a capital ‘D’). Design refers to the detailed attention to everything that makes it into the what we call the UI/UX — user interface and user experience. Everything is obsessed over and not left to chance. The micro-animation of a button and how it makes the user feel, the font of the text for captions vs. body and what their contrasts signify. Not kidding, design thinking takes all this into account and while some of it sounds superfluous, the results are clear.

Design thinking matters. And it matter a lot. Pay attention to the design of your app. Don’t haphazardly decide what as screen looks like or simply accept the default animation between screens. All these details have an affect on how users feel about your app and their satisfaction with it.

Think about how your app’s design can help your app not only be more usable but also more desirable. How can your design help brand your app and differentiate it from other competitors in the market. Take design very seriously and you will have an easier time at achieving success.

4. Architect strategically.

How your app’s code is architected has a direct impact on a number of key success factors — most importantly are performance and modifiability.

By app performance, we mean, how responsive is your app to user actions? Does the app feel sluggish? Does the app make the device hot or drain its battery quickly? These are huge turn-offs to most users and is a sure-fired way to get your app uninstalled. An architectural decision that impacts performance, for example, includes how often you will make calls to the network to get or post data.

Many novice app developers will make a network call for every action a user takes. Consider using a local data store on the device and then syncing with the backend as needed with batched updates. Not only will your app feel more snappy since it is working with local data but it will also drain less of the battery since the number of network calls per session will greatly be reduced.

Finally, modifiability is also a key success factor. How quickly can you add new features to your app, fix bugs or pivot the apps functionality as market requirements change? It is critical that you can launch new features in weeks not months or your competitors will run away with the market share.

5. Define and execute your MVP.

An MVP, or Minimum Viable Product, is the minimum set of features necessary to deliver a single unit of value to the user. Nothing more. So by this definition, for us to define the MVP we need to be crystal clear on what the value is our app is supposed to deliver. This is probably the most important point of this step. What value does your app bring to the end user? Asked another way…why has the user downloaded and is using your app now and in the future?

Once we know what the value proposition of our app is, we now need to understand what feature set delivers just a single unit of that value. If we can deliver just that first unit then we can build on that in future iterations. By focusing on the minimum set and on that single unit we become laser focused on getting our product as quickly as possible into the hands or our first customers. From there we can start to learn real life lessons about what the user’s needs are and how to deliver the value they seek. That is the importance of the MVP. It is just the start of journey we will take with the user.

If we deliver anything more than the MVP we risk wasting precious time or working on suboptimal work effort that could have been spent iterating from what we would learn had the user gotten to our product earlier. As will see next there is time for iteration and maximizing our value through learning and evolution.

6. Iterate intelligently.

Once we have a baseline MVP in our users’ hands we can start to learn how to evolve our app and we’ll begin to iterate. To make sure our iterations are productive we will need to build up some intelligence into our process. There are a number of tools and techniques that can help us with this process. Data analytics, session recordings and heat maps, user journey paths, task success rates, A/B testing…. All these techniques are useful and available to us at varying degrees of complexity. But do I really have to do all this in order to iterate? Not really.

The least you have to do to intelligently iterate is: 1) Have real users using your app; 2) Have a an active feedback mechanism like a give ‘give feedback button’; 3) Have a passive feedback mechanism like user event data that you can analyze.

Now what? For the feedback channel, monitor it closely. Fix all mention of crashes or obvious bugs quickly. For missing feature requests look for patterns. Don’t simply add every feature that is asked for. Is it a recurring theme? Does it match strategically with how you want to grow your apps capabilities and vision?

For the passive user event channel, obviously fix all crash events that arise. To make sense of other user events you will need to have a good handle on your key performance indicators or KPI’s. These are metrics what you define that indicate to you if your app is successful or not. They could be things like completed purchases or successful search results anything you want your users to do in your app. Once you have the KPI’s you simply map your user events to them and then theorize on what feature improvements will increase these events or decrease undesirable ones.