3 Big App Development Mistakes to Avoid

It’s easy to get carried away with app development, but planning can make all the difference.

So you’ve decided to create an app.

You might have had the latest idea for an innovative new startup, or you may have simply decided it was time to take your business to the next level and give your customers a new platform for engagement.

Whatever the case, there are some simple mistakes that many app projects seem to keep making, and which are definitely best avoided in your app development journey. 

Below are three major ones to keep in mind.

1. Ignoring Research (and Marketing)

App failure stories tend to come in two basic forms:

• An app that had an idea that seemed great to the developers/owners, but failed miserably in the market, or,

• An app that was a truly great idea, but failed because it wasn’t marketed properly.

You don’t want your app to do either of these things.

So once you have consulted with your development team to understand what it would take to create your app, it’s also equally important to do a bit of market research to understand how your potential users are going respond to it.

If done properly, what you learn during this research will be of great value, which can then be used to refine your app’s offering and the marketing strategy you will use to get people to actually download it.

2. Not offering engagement incentives

This point could have been titled ‘Forgetting Content is King’. However, that would be missing the full picture.

Content can be many things: a game, important information, movie clips, or even a social network.

However, what content boils down to is that it offers something to your users in return for them downloading your app.

While engaging, dynamic content is undoubtedly a great thing to offer your users, for many businesses, this can be either very difficult to source consistently, or simply does not fit with your brand identity or business.

If you’re having trouble fitting a content budget into your app design – or you simply want a more simple avenue to engagement – you need to develop a detailed plan on how you are going to incentivize downloading your app.

Discounts are a great way to do this, but discounts should also be strategized, and delivered through a formulated marketing plan to your users that is based on Predictive Analytics and personalized targeting.

3. Sidelining UX and UI

Another major mistake that often occurs during the technical development and content planning of an app is placing User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI) design in a secondary place in the process.

It needs to be central.

We’ve written previously on the importance of giving detailed thought to how you are going to integrate your UX and UI design into your development project, and how much authority UX and UI designers should have determining the strategy for your app (or website)’s development.

The best, most successful apps are those that put the user first. All of your content, marketing and technical goals should definitely be run by your dedicated UX / UI designer during the planning stage.

This will allow you to:

• Get their input on how the components of an app should eventually come together, and,

• Receive their input on what parts of your content and proposed technical offering can be refined or changed in order to better serve users.

Are you ready to begin your app adventure?  Get in touch with us and we’ll be happy to discuss how we can leverage our large pool of top IT development talent in our outsourced IT service centers (Madagascar, Vietnam, Mauritius), to make all of your development dreams come true.