Mobile Application Development – Best Practices

There have been many a debates in the past regarding whether Mobile is the way to go forward in the future or not, rather one sided debates though. And as expected and predicted by experts and the rest—Mobile phones have taken over the world technology scene by a storm. It becomes imperative that to be counted among the people who are ready for adaptation in this ever changing world of technology to move ahead,from floppy’s to CDs, from Mainframes to PCs and now from Desktops to Mobile.
A big part of this transition is to make your products and services mobile ready, which means to have a presence on each and every leading mobile platform. And what better way than an app to dominate the mobile landscape and grow your product even further. In this whitepaper we proceed ahead with the steps and best practices you may follow to achieve a great start on the most enterprising platform ever created.

Making an App : Best Practices

1. Consider Your audience

Before you take any time to build an app, consider your audience. What do you hope to achieve? How
do you envision your audience using your app? These are important questions to consider up-front.

2. Check the App Stores

Many times people come up with a great idea for an app and start to brainstorm how to build it. There’s only one problem. Despite how unique you might think your idea is, there’s an excellent chance that someone might have already built it, or something similar to it. If that’s the case, you would be wasting a ton of time (and money). If an app already exists, you can use it as a template to create your own product.

3. Invite potential users in Design process

One danger of any design process is working only with your team and not involving the end users at all. Then, when the design is done and is released to the public, some or many aspects of your design might not translate well to the real world. To avoid this problem, involve potential end users in the design process and use their feedback to make changes as necessary.

4. Create a Storyboard

The storyboard is one of the most important aspects of the design process. This is where you lay out the complete functionality of your app on paper. If there are problems, you can resolve them at this stage. The storyboard allows you to plan out all aspects of the design, including future components, such as plugins.

5. Make an App easy to understand

The app should be easy to understand with descriptions to accompany graphics (if necessary) and additional instructions. One design flaw is relying too much on images to tell the tale. That’s a major error because users might not be able to figure out the purpose of your app if you use a lot of
graphics. Clear instructions are necessary.

6. Avoid overuse of Graphics/Animation

Both graphics and animations can add a nice ―Wow factor to your app but there’s a major downside -slow loading times which translate into a poor user experience. Whenever possible, either avoid the use of bitmaps or animations or limit their use to only essential features. And if you do use graphics, use vector graphics whenever possible. The files sizes from these are much smaller, so they’ll load faster.

7. Consider little details like button size/color

When working with a mobile interface, you have a limited amount of space and some designers add too many buttons/icons. Another consideration is the size of the human fingertip. If the buttons/icons are too small, users could make errors with selecting the wrong one. Likewise, if there’s not enough space between the buttons/icons, that can cause trouble as well. If in doubt, test your layouts and get feedback.

8. Create a consistent workflow

This translates into making sure the user experience remains the same on all platforms. If you change that for each device, you’ll confuse and annoy your users.

9. Test the design

With any design, this is the most important aspect. If you’ve been following the strategies listed in this article you’ll be testing your app every step of the way. Still, it’s important to test the finished product and not only once but several times with different users. If there are problems, fix them, then test the result again.

Get our whitepaper for additional Best practices that include:

  • Mobile App Design – Best Practices
  • Mobile App Architecture – Best Practices
  • Mobile App development Tools
  • Cost estimation techniques and more..