3 Key Stages to Your App’s Success:

Mobile app design can appear extremely vague and pose a lot of questions to the businesses that consider requesting it. “What are the steps? What are the artifacts? How many people will be involved, and what will my role be in it?”

In this article, I answer all these questions and more as I explain what lies behind each of the three main stages of mobile application design.

Business Analysis: 

At the first stage of any mobile app development project, you need to define the target platform (iOS or Android or both), the development method, and the functional requirements. Although this may sound too techy for a start, I can’t stress enough how heavily further steps depend on the decisions you make at this point. To get a load off your mind and make a calculated and confident choice, I recommend completing this step together with a professional business analyst, who has a focus on mobile design.

To decide on the platform, you will need to define your target audience and analyze their platform preferences that depend on geography and income. For example, if you target an average US user, you will be able to win the audience with just an iOS version. But if you want your app to go global, you won’t succeed without an app version for Android, which is overwhelmingly popular in Africa.

Once you define the platform(s) you need to reach, you should consider the development approach. Your options here are:

• Native development – UX and UI design of the app is tailored to the platform’s original guidelines, it looks and feels exactly like any factory app for that platform. This development option entails high implementation costs but guarantees high user satisfaction.
• Hybrid development – UX and UI design is identical on different platforms and thus may feel unnatural to some users at first. Implementation costs are almost 2x lower than with native development.
• Cross-platform development – UX and UI design offers a near-native look and experience on either platform. This option requires about 70% of the native development budget.
• Defining functional requirements is the core objective of business analysis. The requirements help build a detailed concept of your future app and describe all the tasks it will handle in the form of a project specification. Without this document, the UX designers won’t be able to even start their work.