Mobile App Design Services
It’s great to have a mobile responsive website backed by a solid mobile marketing strategy with major resources being allocated to cross-device reach. In today’s competitive era, not having a mobile app has severe implications. A mobile app helps businesses reach more customers, improve marketing strategies, provide value. When the average user spends more time looking at a mobile phone than watching television or using a desktop or laptop, what excuse does your business have for not having a mobile app?
In planning, it is important to invest a large amount of time upfront to make sure that your app at least has a chance at success. Ask the questions 1) are their people willing to use your app and 2) people are willing to pay for your app? Before you move on to the design phase you should be able confidently to answer “yes” to these questions.
Maintenance
This stage begins at the same time as a release and should progress in parallel. Maintenance is where you monitor the status of your app, fix any bugs that may be present, and make sure the app continues to work as expected. Updating your app for new versions of the OS, or to support new devices, is also a part of maintenance.
The Question Remains, Where and How to Start?
Planning and Research
The planning stage should arise immediately after you have imagined your idea for an app. "Planning" here does not refer to deciding how your app will look or how you will program it; rather, the planning stage should aim to answer several high-level questions about the feasibility of your idea in the current market space.
Prototyping
Prototyping is the stage where you start rapidly producing wireframes and iterating on user feedback. A wireframe can be thought of as a low-fidelity guide to the UI and UX of your app and offers a general sense of the app's functionality and flow without getting into the smaller details of color or style.
Design
There are many elements to the design phase of app development, so we will only briefly cover some of the most important ones. Firstly, it is up to your UX and UI designers to further refine the approved wireframes. This means placing and crafting UI elements, defining user flow, understanding the importance of the element hierarchy, etc.
Development
The development stage is where you begin to write the code for the "Final" ; version of the app. This is where you use the feedback you have received from the wire frames and make some final, potentially large, decisions. This is where methodologies such as waterfall or agile can be implemented.
Testing
Ideally, testing occurs in parallel to the development stage. It is important to continually test to keep post-release costs low. Unit tests, UI tests, and integration testing are necessary to ensure that you work out any major bugs or oversights as early as possible. Test cases can increase time spent in the development stage.
Release
This is where you will submit your app to the App Store or Play Store for approval. Learning this process is important since you will be doing this every time you release a new version of the app. At this point in the development process, you should have worked out most of the major bugs your testers found and you should have a quality app that will pass the guidelines for the store.