The Mobile App Development Process
As we specialise in mobile apps development for small and medium sized businesses, we use a unique mobile app development process that sets us apart from other mobile apps development companies. Our process has been specifically designed to ensure we provide our clients with an app that fulfils all their objectives.
Our process is focused on understanding the real workings of your business, identifying what you want to achieve by building an app, and providing you with our expert advice and guidance to ensure we build you an app that you can be proud of.
Free Consultation
Our free consultation is all about us finding out more about your business, and your objectives in developing a mobile app. We discuss your objectives to see what you want your app to deliver for you. You may already have several ideas and we can discuss these with you. If you don’t we’ll go away and conduct some research and generate some app ideas for you.
Options Analysis
This step involves evaluating all the possible mobile app development ideas. We systematically evaluate and analyse all the possible options, comparing each idea and producing a list of all the options available. We present all of these options to you, along with our expert analysis on the advantages and disadvantages of each idea. As we know how mobile apps work, and the various technologies behind them, we are uniquely positioned to evaluate and comment on each of the options. However we deliberately do not rule any ideas out – we present all the app ideas to you so you can decide which one you like best. We will evaluate each option based on your objectives in building a mobile app – in other words, we compare each option against your objectives to see if the option fulfils it.
We’ll present all of this analysis to you so that you can decide which app ideas you like best, which you’d like to develop further, or whether you’d like us to start again.
Mobile App Design
Once a preferred option has been selected, we will then pass the work to our expert design team. This step is often overlooked by many app development companies, but it is arguably the most important step of all. The reason is quite simple: the majority of complaints and bad reviews that mobile apps get is often down to a poorly designed, hard to use interface. If users don’t like the look and feel of your app, or find it hard to use, they will simply stop using your app and give it poor reviews!
We recognise this very real problem, which is why we have a specialist Graphic Design team who work on all our mobile app developments. This team are vastly experienced in designing apps that not only look great but also offer a great user experience.
Our design process involves the following steps:
- Understanding the demographics of your target users. Are they teenagers who are looking for a cool, funky design? Are they professionals looking for a quick and easy to use functional app?
- Identifying, documenting and understanding the “user journeys” within your app. This means identifying the user flows and all the ways in which users will use your app. We’ll produce a full storyboard or “journey map” diagram which gives us a high level picture of what your app will look like.
- Look and feel of the app – does your business have any preferences for colours? Would you like your app to use your own branding?
- Production of screen designs – so you can see what the proposed design looks like before we build it.
We’ll show you the screen designs for your approval before we proceed to the next step of our process.
Develop App Prototype
We will produce a usable app prototype of your app. We’ll install it on a device and then let you use it! We give you a prototype because we realise that seeing a design on paper is vastly different from actually using it. When you’re using it you may not like certain features that looked good on paper, or you may think of additional features that would be nice to include. You may want to change colours, or font sizes, for example.
Whatever it may be, by giving you a prototype we allow you to see your app before it’s fully developed. It gives you the chance to feedback any changes or improvements to us before we commence development.
Mobile App Development
This is where our Geeks really come into their own! We’ll use cutting edge techniques to get your mobile app developed and ready. Our team keeps up to date with the latest mobile app development knowledge and tools, meaning we can implement cutting edge features into your mobile application development.
App Testing
It goes without saying that it is vital that your app is bug free! Buggy apps will soon be noticed by users, leading to poor reviews. After the mobile app development stage is completed, all mobile apps developed by The App Geeks are thoroughly tested. We perform functional testing, usability testing and user acceptance testing. Testing follows a thorough methodology to ensure bug free applications.
Our methodology involves:
- Testing on different devices (phones, tablets)
- Testing across different versions of the phone operating systems (e.g. iOS 7, iOS 8)
- Testing positive and negative cases
- Security testing of the application
We do all this to make sure that we have all the bases covered.
Client Testing
We then give you the opportunity to test the app yourself on your device to see how you like it.
Prepare Marketing
With millions of other apps available on the app store, it is vital that your app is marketed and publicised widely to ensure its success. Our marketing team are highly experienced in using traditional and social media marketing techniques to boost the profile of your app. This can include creation of app-specific websites, social media marketing campaigns, as well as more traditional marketing methods to ensure your app’s success.
Submit App to Store(s)
In this step, we will submit your mobile app to Apple or Google. This is a detailed process and it involves providing artwork for your app’s icon, screenshots for the mobile app description and keywords for your app to enable people to find it.
Monitor App Performance
Once your app has gone live, would you like to know how many downloads it has had? Would you like to know which devices and OS versions your users are currently running? How much time do users spend using your app? Which features are popular, and which ones are rarely accessed? Do you want to find out how your in-app sales are doing?
If you would like answers to the above questions we can provide them! We collate the information and present it to you in an easy-to-understand format at regular intervals for you to see how your app is performing.
We really like the way you outline your process on the website and would be open to changing ours to be closer to yours but this is what we are currently thinking.
Our Project Overview: Communications App
We are soliciting bids for building a user experience for the App we created last year. Based on our designs (30 distinct screens) we are hiring a company to digitize the UX in a hand held scale. We would like the screens linked by touch screen command but otherwise static and not yet integrated into the back-end system.
This will be used to demonstrate the look and feel of using the App to stake holders before phase two.
(Phase two, would expose the full set of real business logic to the front end, and connecting it to the back-end infrastructure for the production, network enabled, cloud based deployment of the App.)
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