As Featured on Arabnet: "Do you have an App Idea? Don’t Jump into Building It Yet" - written by TEDMOB
ARABNET | 06, Jul 2017
In the age of innovation everyone including my grandmother has the next million dollar idea for an app that in their opinion will be acquired and sold for billions. Some risk takers would actually take the jump and actually develop their ideas. Here comes the difference between entrepreneurs whose ideas successfully reach the market as concrete apps versus those whose dreams remain just that — dreams?
We are not being pessimistic here but we can say that few succeeded and a lot more fail. With our experience at TEDMOB we try to minimizes the damage by encouraging the risk takers and Apprenuers that seek our services to take the below steps before jumping into development.
Let’s start of by explaining an important step that should be taken before development and that could save from many failures:
What Is an MVP?
MVP stands for a minimum viable product. What is it? Let’s have a closer look at the meaning of each word in this phrase:
- Minimum means a product is so poor, simple and bad that no one wants to buy or use it. However, you will need a minimum amount of resources to create such an App.
- Viable means a product of your dreams – it’s useful, interesting, fast and has a beautiful design. But you should know that it takes a lot of time, money and efforts to create a viable App.
What is a compromise? An MVP which is an App with a minimum set of features that solves a definite problem of users. It allows you to spend as little resources as possible to engage your first users and get useful feedback.
It’s important to understand: an MVP is not synonymous with unfinished or a primitive App that was created in a hurry. By creating an MVP you can better understand your audience needs and expectations and fit your app to it. It’s also important to choose a right development agency for building an MVP. If the MVP fails, you can stop development and production before wasting any more time and money on a product that will not gain traction with your consumers.
Designing a simple MVP takes significantly less time than designing an entire web or mobile app with a set of fully loaded features. It also prevents you from designing features that will not benefit your users.
How Do You Create a Mobile App as an MVP?
When you work with us, we help you transform ideas into viable business by analyzing patterns and measuring competition for web and mobile apps.
It all starts with understanding the core features needed for your MVP and delivering those features to your consumer base for testing.
First, we help you define your MVP must-have features that bring value to its users pushing aside features that are not necessary for basic use of the application. Once must-have core features are defined we help you prioritize them from most to least important by understanding each of the features components and how they will be used.
When we at TEDMOB create the MVP it is important to:
- Market and test the MVP with your users and obtain user feedback.
- Grow the value of the MVP into a more fully functioning product by analyzing data and user feedback.
- Use Lean UX (User Experience) to put together the MVP to improve the product and gain stakeholder interest.
Then another point we focus on is ‘DESIGN’ actually not only just design but User Experience Design
User experience is a part of the design process that you don’t hear about unless something goes wrong. But it is something that should be an integral part of the design process, from early concepts to the final product. To put it simply, UX is important because it tries to fulfill the user’s needs. It aims to provide positive experiences that keep users loyal to the App.
We at TEDMOB start with the principle of collaborative design, opening the process to our team of creative professionals with the common goal of solving a problem. Our team needs to work together with our clients to create a set of great aesthetics, vision and goals for a design project. We think about the connection and experience you want users to have: simple, surprise, formal and credible or emotional.
Making sure the experience creates a shared story that will be familiar to all users. Then test, test, test. User experience is an art form of its own. You never can predict for certain how your app will be perceived. What you can do is arm yourself with an experienced company like TEDMOB to make informed decisions about UX in the design process.
Last but not least: Launch Your App
Once we have developed your minimum mobile app and went through a study with you and finalized the user experience design, it is time to launch the product and gain the valuable feedback to help you decide on enhancements to the product and add or create more user-friendly features. Here we try to analyze data such as:
- Identifying your mobile apps strengths.
- Identifying weaknesses, flaws and missing features.
- Analyzing user feedback.
- Continuing development of the mobile app while keeping user feedback and the product roadmap in mind.
Gain valuable feedback from users with app reviews in the app store and star ratings as well as through social media sites like Twitter. Users are more likely to point out something bad about the mobile app than they are to point out something they like.
Therefore, feedback needs reviewing and analyzing to determine the viability of the product. While we continue to develop mobile app, it is important to define user feedback against the original vision of the product.
Is the product doing what you intended it to do? Are users using it the way you want it to be used?
As your digital development right arm of mobile app, we will walk you through every step, help you along the way and work with you to determine if you have a viable product or if you need to go back to the drawing board.
As a summary, we suggest you invest in researching your App idea before heading to development and always question and take advice from professionals like TEDMOB regarding your App features. You need to remember that you still have to sell your app. Just because your app is in the store does not mean you are going to start making millions tomorrow. Marketing is a must.
While this doesn't fall under the steps to "make" an app, it is definitely important to make your app successful. If you do not market your app well once it is released, there is a high possibility of it being lost in the multitude of apps available on the various stores. We will leave you with this note for your app: “The easiest way to get 1 million people paying is to get 1 billion people using.” – Phil Libin, Evernote Founder
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