Mobile application development is rising day by day. Countless applications are made, but the problem is that they don’t always succeed. One of my favorite quotes goes something like this “You can only understand people if you feel them in yourself.”
Simply put, if visitors don’t find your app useful or if people continue to uninstall your app, you’re doing something wrong. The success of mobile application development depends on how your app aids your users and how it adds value to them. If you haven’t put yourself in your visitor’s shoes, there is a slim chance for success. There are many factors that developers ignore while developing a mobile application. Some of these mistakes are so minor that developers wave them off.
What are these factors? How can you avoid making these mistakes? This is what we will discuss in this blog post. Read on to find out about some of the ordinary yet underestimated factors that affect the success of mobile application development.
App isn’t tested:
Launching your app without getting it checked is equivalent to taking a leap in the dark. After your app is developed, you must get it tested to remove any functional or usability issues.
After I’ve compiled a blog post, my strategy is to take a break and then read my article. If I don’t find any mistakes, I get it reviewed by a friend. I have to make sure that everything I’ve mentioned is easily understood, valid, and grammatically correct.
When It comes to an entire app, It has to be tested, and by no means should you leave out this step.
Here are the factors for testing a mobile app:
Functional Testing
In the functional testing phase, the app is tested to ensure that it functions and does everything that it has been developed to do. In this step, all the features and functional specs are verified.
Performance Testing
App performance testing is conducted to make sure that users can quickly get around the app and find what they came for. This step ensures that the app is effective and has good speed. If the application doesn’t load or respond efficiently, it must be optimized.
Edge-case Testing
Edge-case testing is when you submit the application to some unexpected scenarios. This allows you to test how well an app will perform if the user does something unexpected. For example, if something fails in an app, how well do the other components work and what steps can be taken to rectify this situation.
Device-specific Testing
In this step, the app is tested on different screen sizes and various OS versions. There are thousands of devices and operating systems out there, so you have to make sure that your app can function equally well on all devices.
Usability Testing
I remember making an online purchase on an app I had installed for the first time. I added my items to the cart and proceeded to checkout. Here, for some unknown reason, I couldn’t add my card. As soon as I entered my card information and hit submit, the data would just disappear.
Keeping my fingers crossed I decided to order using my laptop. I found the item, added it to the cart, just as I was about to check out, an error occurred that my card was invalid.
How could my card be invalid? Hoping for an answer, I called the support team. They couldn’t do much to help me and told me that the issue was coming from my side. So I abandoned that site and their app and decided to shop somewhere else. My transactions were effortless. What does that mean? That means that the previous app gave me a lousy user experience.
This is the type of problem that the usability test can prevent. The usability test will ensure that the features and functionality meet the end users requirements.
Reviews :
If there any other problems, the user’s reviews will help you solve them.
The Smaller, the Better:
This is kind of a no-brainer, too much data or large images and videos can slow down your mobile application. The server will take a long time to load, and if the app’s UI isn’t well designed, the application will have a hard time figuring out what to do. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that you should start chopping away all the essential features and the images.
The solution is simple, ‘data compression’.
Data compression can reduce the size of images, video content, graphics, and sound to accelerate the app and improve usability. You won’t have to sacrifice your hard work or remove any aesthetic features.
Ignoring the backend infrastructure
I’ve had some awful experiences with some apps (I can’t give you their details). The type of apps that are not ready to do anything, they don’t accomplish what you ask
them to, they are sluggish and moreover, full of glitches.
These type of issues only occur if the backend does not meet the necessary infrastructure. The server might not be functioning efficiently on the multi-layered infrastructure, or there might be issues while running the application code. There are numerous reasons for the arising problems.
Another ‘underestimated’ mistake that developers make is ‘neglecting the backend support.’
Especially for eCommerce and gaming applications, it’s time to embrace faster and better technologies for support and storage.
An obvious solution for this is ‘cloud integration.’ You need a robust backend that can handle scalability and efficiently manage the traffic flow.
Coming back to the backend infrastructure, it’s recommended that you go through and debug interactions between different parts of the application. This is also known as ‘Application Dependency Mapping.’ Also, try to take some load off the server, take it out of its misery, and you will be rewarded with a number of advantages.
Wrong targeted audience
Before you begin developing and marketing your mobile application you ‘have’ to do some research about your target audience.
If you own a sandwich stand and you decide that “Oh Subway is right across the street. They sell sandwiches, and I sell sandwiches, I need to start selling in front of Subway”. That’s not going to work out how you expect it to, in fact, you will lose the few customers you already have. Similarly, you need to develop and market an app according to your target audience and their needs. Not understanding your target audience is the best way to make sure that your app is doomed. When considering your target audience, you have to remember the following factors:
- Gender
- Age
- Hobbies
- Location
- Occupation
- Educational level
- Income
It all depends on the product you plan to target. Companies that follow this mobile application development strategy have the following advantages:
- Saving time and resources
- Developing long term relationships with customers
- Eliminating the bottom-feeders (invaluable audience)
- Be more competitive
- Improve your conversion rates
No updates to meet user’s needs
Mobile app launch isn’t a one-time event. Companies think that “The app is out, I’ll just throw it in on play store and forget all about it.” That isn’t how it works, your mobile will always need improvement, and that will require that the app is reassessed according to the changing market demands. The app will need to be updated to keep the users engaged.
Here are some things that you should monitor for making the necessary updates in your app :
Loading time
Observe the start and resume time, this strongly impacts the user experience.
UI Response Time:
Monitor how fast the app responds to a user’s input, how long does it take to display a search result or how long does it take to make transactions. With this information, you can optimize for improvement.
Crashes of Mobile Apps
Crashes can drive away customers in seconds. It shows that your system is unreliable, especially if something like this happens during a transaction.
To prevent this, you will need to track down the user actions that caused a crash; this will help you track and make the required amends.
Analytics
Analytics are very useful if you want to learn how users interact with your app and which features they use the most. This will give you an insight about your users and how you can add further improvements.
App Store Management
Noting the reviews and ratings of your new app can give you valuable insight into what users like or what they want. Furthermore, by aiding frustrated users, you can boost your brand’s reputation.
This wouldn’t be it, if I were to cover any more issues, this article would go very long. To give you an idea here are some other factors that are underestimated and ignored while developing mobile apps:
- Replicating other popular apps
- Not allowing enough marketing time
- Communication competency both in and out of an organization
- Ineffective or bad UI
- Team happiness (if you want an app that people enjoy using, it all comes down to ‘who creates the app’. Make sure that the people you hire aren’t just there for the money, they’re there to give you results, and they enjoy what they do.)
Conclusion :
Considering some of the most devastating yet underestimated mistakes mentioned above, no wonder so many apps fail. If you want your app to succeed, it’s critical that you map out your developing, marketing and deployment strategy.
Marketing your app is just as important as its development and making sure that it is tested and updated is essential for its success as prosperity.
Development isn’t a small thing; you have a lot on the line; Your investment, your time, and, your vision. Even the most insignificant factors can pose to be barriers for you and your team.
If you’ve read up to here, there is no doubt you are looking for ways to make your mobile application development successful. I hope the points I’ve discussed above were helpful. If you’d like to add anything, I’m more than happy to hear what you have to say.
Although most of the mobile app development companies claim that they test the app before launch, the important thing here is who test the app. Some companies treat application tester as an extra burden. Rather than building a dedicated QA team, they simply hand over the testing job to mobile app developers.