(Newswire.net — August 13, 2021) — Apps are a great tool for any business to attract and retain customers – no doubt about it.
Consider the fact that most Americans spend between 3 to 4 hours per day on their mobile phones. More and more, apps are becoming the preferred way most consumers interact with their services, and if you’re making your business available on the most prime customer-facing real-estate there is – you’re heading in the right direction.
Problem is – apps can seem complicated for the non-technical business owners and entrepreneurs out there. There are a ton of questions surrounding them like how you even go about building an app, what’s the cost to build an app, and how do you even begin to learn to build an app.
Well, this is the article for you. We’re going to run through the process of how to build an app for your business, with a nifty little time and money-saving tool.
Refine Your Idea
The first step of any app build is making sure you know exactly what you want to achieve with your app. By having your goals clearly defined going into the project, you’ll be able to measure its success at the end of – and then refine accordingly.
Some common things to consider when refining your app idea:
- Who is going to be primarily using it?
- How often do I want them to interact with it?
- What is the primary goal of them using it?
- What devices do my target users primarily use?
Once you’ve got on top of your idea, it’s time to define your features.
Define Your Features
Typical app features are things like “Sign In and Sign Up functionality”, and “contact forms”. You’ll likely find that the majority of the features you want to include in your app are already built.
Step 1: Define everything you want your app to be able to do, based on the goals and questions you answered in the above section.
Step 2: List the features which will help you achieve those, in order of priority from “Absolutely Necessary” to “Nice to Have”.
Step 3: Start going through various mock interactions in your head. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes and think about the different ways in which they would interact with your app. What are the different things they’d want to achieve? Can you do all of them with this feature list?
If you’re a bit more technical, Storyboarding is a great way to visualize the different user flows within your app.
Add and refine until you have a final list that encapsulates all the functionality needed.
Remember: The more features you include, the more complex your app can get, and the more costs that can be potentially associated.
As a general principle – simpler is better, especially when getting started.
Pick Some Inspiration
Now it’s time to pick some design inspiration. The two types of inspiration I like to draw from are:
- Apps I like the look of, and
- Other apps in my industry or from my competitors.
You’re looking for things like:
- Typography
- Colour combinations
- Interactions (animations)
- Screen layouts
- Menu’s
A great source of design inspiration is Dribbble, which is an online portfolio for designers.
Another is the App Store Charts. Filter according to your industry and check out the design of the most popular apps.
Plug It Into App Builder
You’ve now got everything you need to get started with Builder.ai’s App Builder tool.
Yup, that’s right, you don’t actually have to do any of the work yourself – Builder.ai’s App Builder will take your list of functions and design inspiration and put it into a workable prototype within a matter of minutes.
From your prototype, you’ll be able to refine the look and feel of your app and give feedback to an actual human, before it goes into build mode and the core functionality gets created.
And that’s it – easy as that.