They say everyone has at least one million-dollar-idea in their life. If you’re lucky, that idea might just be something as concrete as an app. But before putting all of your life savings in assembling a development team to transform your idea into a reality, you need to know how any app development process goes. Or at least have a rough idea of it—which is exactly what we’re going to do here.
Before we get started, remember that developing an app takes a lot of work, time, money, and (most importantly) know-how. If you don’t already have access to the tech Talent necessary to develop high-quality products, you might want to look into IT Outsourcing Services to close that gap. Anyway, let’s start at the beginning.
1. The Discovery
Any idea needs to support itself on a comprehensive description of what it is and what it will try to achieve. Otherwise, it’s very easy to fall c level contact list off the tracks and end up with a product that doesn’t really stand up to your vision. And nobody wants that.
Start by brainstorming as many details as you can possibly imagine. Don’t beat yourself up if you’re not satisfied with how much or how little you come up with. But remember that, today, less is more.
After that, you will need some method to organize everything you came up with and start rounding off the edges of your future app. Most businesses use the Lean Canvas to put crucial information on a visual and easy-to-follow grid. Through it, you will be able to identify your app’s role in the market.
Although you can choose to customize your Lean Canvas anyway you want, in an app development process you need to focus in at least 10 areas:
- Problem: The ”’why”
- Alternatives: Current market competitors
- Solutions: The “how”
- Metrics: The KPIs you will measure
- Cost structure: Your fixed and variable costs
- Value proposition: How you deliver value
- Unfair advantage: Your secret ingredient
- Channels: How you’re going to reach people
- Revenue streams: Cash-flow
- Customers: Your key segments
Once you have a solid Canvas, visualizing how your app’s major components work with one another becomes a whole lot easier. Just remember that, whatever you do, the end-user is always at the core of your decisions.
2. The Validation
Following your gut can be good but it doesn’t mean you can’t support your idea with some cold-hard data. In the app development process, the validation stage often begins with a low-fidelity prototype. What? Prototype? Are we going to start programming right away? Not really, no.
A low-fidelity prototype is not a functional app—it’s just a visualization of it. Think of a set of drawings that defines the interaction between screens ignoring the quality of the content and how users experience those screens. It might seem basic but it serves one major purpose: verifying that you and your app development team see the product the same way. It also works as a reference point to come back while the project progresses and prevents you from missing the nail on costs.
Once you have this, you can start looking at how your idea holds up in the real world. This part of the app development process requires a lot of marketing creativity by your side, but here are a few ideas you can try:
- Benchmark: Go to your target app marketplace and see how other apps are dealing with the problem you’re trying to solve.
- Search Queries: Browse the Internet and find out if people are looking for a solution to your problem or how they are dealing with it.
- Surveying: Based on your low-fidelity prototype, get some initial feedback from your target audience.
- Advertise: Run a campaign on your saudi data up-and-coming app and see how many people are interested in it.
No matter how creative you are, a low-fidelity prototype can only take you so far. Once you feel confident with the way you want to apply the data you gathered, you can step up your game and build a medium-fidelity prototype. This still isn’t a functional app, but rather a better-looking version of what you had before that better represents the UX design and functionality of your product.