Planning Your Mobile App Development: 5 Important Steps

Planning Your Mobile App Development: 5 Important Steps

Have you been in a position where you’re making one step forward and two steps backward when it comes to mobile app development? Do you feel as if you’re just burning through your budget without any measurable results?

Don’t worry, you’re not the only one. Mobile app development is becoming increasingly important for brands across almost every industry. However, one widely underestimated part of it all is planning.

The reasons for failing to tailor a proper plan prior to the mobile app development process might differ. These include, but are not limited to:

  • Overtrusting your mobile app development contractor
  • Falling short to map out the necessary steps
  • Underestimating its importance
  • Lack of knowledge

Regardless of what the problem is, the conclusion remains constant: planning is absolutely critical.

As an experienced mobile app development company in Singapore, we at Swag Soft spend the necessary time and resources to both educate our clients on its importance, while mapping out each step of the mobile app development process in advance.

In case you’re still having second thoughts on whether you need a mobile app in the first place, we suggest taking a look at these 4 reasons in favor of a mobile appHaving said this, let’s look at 5 steps which will help you plan out the mobile app development process and achieve your goals without overspending.

Step #1: What’s The Concept For Your Mobile App?

The first step of every plan is mapping out the concept of your mobile app. You can start by asking yourself some of the following questions:

  • What’s the mobile app all about?
  • What are your own expectations from this mobile app?
  • How is it going to function?
  • How is it going to be useful to your end-users?

These are just a few fundamental questions you have to have an answer for before you start the mobile app development itself. However, they will also help you cut out everything which could be frivolous. It will teach you to be disciplined, while also developing concise, sharp thinking.

These questions will also help you shape up the core vision for your mobile app, as well as to identify its key features and how you picture them functioning.

Step #2: What’s Your Audience?

This is a widely underestimated area of mobile app development that a lot of companies tend to forego.

A clearly identified target audience will impact your design and development decisions. However, it is also going to help your pre-launch app marketing strategy. These reasons are just a few for which finding out your target audience in advance is so crucial.

You should try to understand what your ideal customer’s “buying” behavior is, and what are his preferences. This is going to help you determine your audience’s expectations from your mobile app. Some hint questions include:

  • Who is your ideal user?
  • What problem is he facing?
  • Is there an existing gap in the marketplace you can exploit?

We should probably mention that this is the perfect time to gather some untampered and honest feedback from everyone in your circle. You can also leverage surveys, forums, and a whole lot of other market research techniques for that.

Step #3: Competition: Identify Similar Apps

Unless you have a mobile app concept which is particularly niche or entirely unique, chances are that there is something similar out there.

Now, this is where a lot of companies mistakenly think that competition is bad. Mobile app development in Singapore, and everywhere else, for that matter, is competitive. You need to be using this to your advantage.

Why do something from scratch if someone has already paved the way for you? In other words, you can easily take a look at similar apps and find out their weak spots. Once you do so, take advantage – better them. You can also tap into their own audience by providing a better solution for a problem they are obviously already facing.

Helpful questions to answer here are:

  • Why is your competitor’s mobile app successful?
  • Why do people use this mobile app?
  • What is their go-to-market plan?
  • Do they have a gap you can exploit?
  • Can you better them?

Step #4: Brainstorm, It Helps

As an experienced mobile app development company in Singapore, we can’t stress out enough how important and helpful brainstorming is.

It can help redefine, as well as improve your mobile app’s concept with new fresh ideas and suggestions from anyone in your team. It helps a lot if you have creative, as well as creative thinkers in your team. Their input on the matter will prove to be invaluable, trust us!

In general, it’s very important to bring in the people who will be able to produce additional value for your mobile app and its idea. However, if you can include people from different areas of expertise, this is going to be even better.

Step #5: Create a Master List of Expected Outputs

If you’ve come so far, congratulations! It means you are doing things right. Based on the research you’ve done thus far, you should start putting down expected outputs on a list.

It’s highly likely that changes have taken merit following the conceptualization of your mobile app, but that’s okay. It means that you’re improving. Now, it’s time to create the oh-so-important list of expected outputs. Put down everything you can think of here. You will be crossing things out later after consulting with a professional mobile app developer, if you don’t have one in your team, of course.

It’s also important to keep your mobile app’s description constantly updated based on the most recent changes.

Wrapping it Up

We’ve put down a lot of words, we know. However, all of the above really matters. You can save yourself a whole bunch of trouble if you just plan properly. Take one step forward and march 3 steps even further, instead of going backward – that’s what we like to do at Swag Soft. If you’d like us to give you a hand in the development of your mobile app or you just want to shoot some questions, don’t hesitate to get in touch! This is why we’re here!