Challenges in Making a “Perfect” App

We all know it’s a tough task if you think of developing an attractive app. Apart from time-taking design process & tedious coding tasks, there are still a lot of challenging obstacles you must be aware of before making up your mind about app development. This app has to be eye-catching but completely glitch-free, high on performance but easy on battery too. Let’s take a look at the challenges you’re sure to face while developing an ideal app.

Every great innovation starts with an idea, not just an idea but a highly creative one. You can’t go mainstream if you aim to touch people’s lives. It’s your idea which you’re gonna bring to life, so aim for perfection. Collect data once you have an idea, visualize what it’s gonna look like. For a start, think about something that could make people’s life easy. After all, that’s the whole point of having an app. Keep things as simple and effective as possible. While conceiving the idea, seek answers for questions, like:

Determining the target groupsThis is the most important step of all and most difficult too. You need to have a requirement for your app& the requirement is generated by the people. So, you need to find out who your target customers will be. It will be easy to target a particular group once you know the basic idea about your potential customers, like their age-group, niche, location and their maximum presence online. For an instance if you’re planning an app for fitness domain then your target customers are likely to be 18-30-year-old gym-going crowd and athletes, and the app must contain features like calorie trackers, diet plans, workout plans etc.

Development costsManaging development costs is one of the biggest challenges you are sure to face while in your quest for creating a perfect app. Getting finances for your project is a tricky part and sometimes troublesome too. For this, you need to have a clear & simple financial model. Don’t forget to think about the alternatives like private investors or crowdfunding etc. You need to define your project members for this task, above all you need to have a project plan. Set rational milestones for your projects and define goals. Most importantly, you need to set a budget encompasses all the necessary expenses for development and advertisement of your app. The defined budget should also have a margin for unforeseen expenses. While making a budget keep this in mind that you must also cover some of the profitability aspects too. Like, how much should it be sold for, about trial version and in-app purchases.

This is the first phase of designing after you’re done with studying every aspect of the conceptual phase. At this phase you need to make a prototype of your conceptual design, to study the functioning of this app. Give this prototype to some end users and ask for their feedback on functionality, interface, and design. This way you can tune your app to perfection for your target audience. After multiple prototypes, you’ll get a perfect app for publishing. You also need to study any other apps of the same type and correct their shortcomings in your app. This will be an iterative process and very challenging too.

Making it attractive Another challenging step is creating an attractive app suitable for the modern clientele. It must have simple interface but amazing visual effects and animations as well. Make use of 3D graphics, shadows and animations wherever possible, transitions must be smooth to give a realistic touch. Everything must be abstract and your app should look like a piece of art. The main difference between desktop applications and mobile phone applications is that mobile phones are much more compact and even the smallest space needs to be managed for making it look good. It’s all about making the right use of every pixel.

Make it interactive:Including transitions and a responsive design, you must definitely consider making the app interactive. It is the most time-consuming challenge one can face during the design phase and therefore it must be planned in advance. The main reason behind making it interactive is that the mobile devices are equipped with highly advance sensors and they offer a whole lot of opportunities. This also offers you a great chance to create a unique app that stands out of the crowd. Make the best use of the sensors, as interactions are often considered as including tap and swiping gestures. So it is advised that you must consider using more of “tangible” interaction which allows your app to respond in a much smarter way. Like, use the proximity sensor to turn on the display when someone puts the phone in front of the face or shaking or flipping phone to change the screen.

The first trait of an app should be that it must be self-explanatory as most of the users don’t want to exercise their brains while using an app. Moreover, one should keep this in mind that the functionality of app is definitely clear to the creator, but this doesn’t mean that it’ll be the same for the users. Make use of a simple app structure to deal with this challenging situation. You should always provide brief instructions on how to use features of that app. If required, you may also include tutorials for providing extended help and support. Use of Icons/thumbnails is yet another great way of displaying information in a very compact and precise way. But careful while using thumbnails as too many of them can confuse the user. Use only those symbols that are most commonly used in other apps across different platforms.

Design and visual part of the app is a constituent part of the big picture. Performance to energy ratio is yet another aspect of this picture. The biggest challenge is not just designing an attractive app but more about making an app that operates smoothly and is completely error-free, most importantly it shouldn’t drain heavy amount of energy from phone’s battery. Here, the performance and energy efficiency of an app are solely the responsibility of programmers/developers. Performance of an app is differently perceived by its users. In general, it is completely based on loading time and speed of action, and how smoothly the transitions run, the app should be error-free, and should avoid any crashes. Moreover, the more sensors your app uses the more battery it consumes.

However, there are some alternatives available nowadays that save the hassle and provide you an app in a few easy steps with almost no production costs the best example of such a platform is ViralBao App maker.