10 things to plan before you develop mobile applications

Lead: David Tucker is the chief architect of Universal Mind, a company expert in Apple and Adobe, working closely with Universal mind customers to develop new development platforms for the current Tucker Product applications with a rich user experience. A few days ago, he wrote on Mashable, a foreign science and technology blog, pointing out the 10 things developers need to plan first in the mobile application development issue.

Webmaster House (chinaz.com) March 2 compiled: The popularity of smart phones, aroused the public to the mobile phone more new features, more service content of the desire to meet market demand, mobile application developer groups are also growing, according to incomplete statistics, the global mobile developers have reached 1 million. Many companies include mobile application development in the schedule. It is quite simple to churn out a fast application, but to develop a strategic application or digital "solution" is quite complex, so intelligent planning is essential.

Here are 10 things developers need to plan before they can develop a mobile application.

1. Combine the original drive and future development direction

When building a digital solution strategy, first review your organization's original goals for a program, hope to be seen as innovators, or make progress in one area to avoid competition? The combination of the original drive and the direction of future development often makes you a leader in the competition. Should your digital solution help build customer loyalty and achieve higher customer self-service, or should you focus on creating new sources of revenue? Once you've identified the direction of the goal and made clear what priority you should take, you know where to start.

2. Know your target audience

The next step is to understand who your target users are, their goals and requirements, and the technologies they use. This process involves studying the platforms that users are most likely to take advantage of, and then getting a sense of each user experience. Each device is different, and each user has a variety of requirements. For example, a person usually uses an online banking application to pay for the bill, but he may also use the bank's mobile app to find the nearest ATM.

3. Establish a user test focus group

Spending more time with your target audience is the only way to make sure you really understand the needs of their mobile apps, when you have some new discoveries or ideas in the process, you can discuss them with the focus group, where the value of the focus group is often far beyond the initial stage of exploration.

4. Determination of a minimum feasible solution set

Don't try to solve the whole problem at once. Instead, companies should identify a minimum workable solution and start there. In other words, start with a rudimentary but full-featured application, and then use the efficient upgrade path provided by most devices to update regularly, allowing you to get into the market faster and improve as needed.

5. Make plans for multiple versions

For mobile applications, the launch of the first version is just the beginning. Statistics show that when new features are added, many users will be attracted to your application again. The original version should contain the key features of the application to attract users, and then do not update too frequently to avoid the user aversion, in most cases, the major version of the update release should be kept between 2-3 months of the empty window period.

6. Balance the relationship between user and business value gains

It is hard to keep a balance between business drivers and the real needs of users, and in many cases the two are at odds with each other. So learn to arm yourself with the right information to make a sensible trade-off. Gather a number of research findings on user research, expert opinion, business feasibility, and technical feasibility studies that can be used to analyze tradeoffs to achieve the best balance between user-centric solutions and business value gains.

7. Explore popular applications in different platforms

Take time to explore applications in every platform you plan to support, each offering a different set of interface paradigms and applications, and testing the most popular applications will not only help you understand what applications are suitable for this platform, but also what users expect. If possible, use different mobile platform devices during the testing process.

8. Bring your IT team into the discussion environment as early as possible

The larger technical challenge is to link back-end business processes to digital solutions, and the technical infrastructure of a multi-channel solution is far beyond the platform you choose for front-end development. In order to be successful, organizations must consider how to build data transfer and API management, as well as security, scalability, content aggregation, device optimization, API translation, etc., so bring your IT team into the discussion environment as early as possible.

9. Decide on a technology that you can rely on or develop

With the continuous maturation of the mobile field, there will be more application development options. In many cases, your goals will help determine your choices in this area. For example, if your goal is to secure as many users as possible on all platforms, you can choose a small hardware integrated HTML framework. If your goal is to provide in-depth hardware integration for augmented reality (augmented Reality) technology, you are likely to develop a local application. Decisions around technology can directly affect the functionality of your application.

10. Analysis of how to measure success

The final step in this process is to determine how to measure success. With a potential function, device, platform, and technology, defining success is challenging and it affects your final strategy. You can consider the following questions: whether this will increase our trading volume; whether this will increase the user's adoption rate and retention rate, whether it will enhance our brand awareness and loyalty, whether it will reduce our costs, how many users we want to use our applications, how we will integrate our existing analytical tools; How we are going to integrate solutions with our social media programs. (Sugar sugar)