Creating Mobile Apps Your Consumers Will Love
Creating Mobile Apps Your Consumers Will Love
Consider the apps you love most. Think about what makes you love it and use it. Chances are it’s highly-entertaining or informative, or it simplifies your life in a significant way. But good mobile apps don’t just happen. They have to be developed with the end-user’s wants and needs at the center of the design process. And a “one size fits all” approach doesn’t work either. Great apps generally fall into one of these four, or a combination of these categories:
1. It makes life easier
2. It’s informative
3. It’s entertaining
4. It saves time and money
That’s a pretty simple formula for success, but creating it and tying it all together with a user interface (UI) that impresses your consumer is no easy feat. It takes a great deal of technical skill coupled with a deep understanding of what appeals to your customer to keep them coming back for more. Incorporate these basics into your app design and you’ll have customers in the palms of your hands.
Consumers love apps that look good and are smart
The app world is competitive. The way an app looks and feels is crucial and it’s likely that you’ll only have one chance to make a good impression. If a user downloads your app and it doesn’t operate well then chances are you’ve lost that customer for good. If there are really cool elements that could be built into the design, first ask whether or not it adds functionality. If it doesn’t, scrap it. An app should feel intuitive and smart to its user, not clunky, overdesigned or bogged down.
Consumers love apps that do all the work
When designing an app developers must consider how people think things should naturally work and design according to those specifications. Users don’t want to do a ton of work to use an app. Remember they’re drawn to apps that make their lives easier in some way. The best way to determine if consumers will find the app usable is to let them use it. Test it out on potential users. Watch them as they navigate through the app and ask questions. Figuring out design issues early will save time, money and heartache.
Consumers love apps that make “mobile” sense
A presentation by mobility expert Nick Watt says a good app “plays to the strengths of mobile” which he says are: communications, spontaneity, geo-sensitivity, short periods of use and focused activity. Watt uses Shazam, the music discovery application that utilizes a smartphone’s microphone to listen to ambient music and correctly identifies it, as his example. Shazam typically isn’t a regularly used application, but it serves a purpose. The app keeps a log of each song it tags, allowing the user to quit the app after identifying a song. The options to buy, listen or share a track via Twitter or Facebook increases interaction time and the likelihood of the user coming back to the app to get the name of the track many times after it was first tagged. What’s not to love about an app that helps you remember the name of that song you breakdanced to in 6th grade!
Testing “lovability”
Finally, to find out how likely it is that a customer is going to love your app, simply ask yourself: ” Is the app intuitive and pleasing to the eye?” Would I use it again? Did the experience resonate with me? And lastly, would I recommend it? If the answer is yes, yes, yes and yes. You have a winner.
At InfoVision, we have the experience and expertise to develop mobile apps that customers love. To learn more about how we can provide the solutions you need, contact us today.