Mon Dec 16 2019
4 common mistakes mobile app developers make
We use Uber to get from point A to point B, we rely on DoorDash to get takeout from nearby restaurants, and we scroll happily around Amazon in search of the next best Christmas gift for our parents. It’s no news that we have become an app-driven world, and that we love doing pretty much anything on the go, from exploring Instagram’s latest trends, all the way to reading the news and listening to educational podcasts on our way to work. In that world, mobile app developers have the potential to cater to four billion users, which means that even narrowing down to a specific target market means you can deal with millions of paying customers.
So, the potential profit from developing mobile apps is staggering, and naturally, many developers rush to do just that. Meanwhile, they make irreparable mistakes, or relatively simple ones that can cost them dozens of users, resulting in disgruntled reviews, and ultimate failure. The best way to go about building a mobile app is to avoid making certain mistakes altogether, and here are a few to steer clear of at all times!
Adding too many functionalities
The "never enough" mindset is not something highly lucrative in the world of app development. When you’re aiming to impress your audience, and add features that not even your most avid mobile users would ever be remotely interested in, you actually risk alienating your target audience entirely. Developers tend to focus on creating apps that are functional and diverse enough, but never too versatile with features, since you can never pinpoint the future trends of mobile apps.
When the time comes, you’ll either create an entirely new app to satisfy those new needs, or you’ll revamp your old one, but deliberately cramming too many functionalities into a single app that’s supposed to be simple and seamless can actually drive users away. Plus, such projects tend to create more bugs than usual, so your users will encounter issues more frequently.
Insufficient updates and fixes
Some novice app developers might get overly excited at the idea of crafting a perfect app and then sitting back to watch the money pile slowly at their feet. As profitable as the market may seem, earning from a mobile app is never a simple task that ends the moment you launch your app for several key platforms. You want to make sure that your users continuously enjoy exceptional user experience, that the app runs smoothly at all times, and for that, you need to fix bugs that will inevitably occur, and launch updates.
Soon enough, you’ll have user reviews and feedback, as well, which will provide you more insights into how you can better your service. Releasing your app should not be the end goal, but the start to a whole new journey of delivering an even better app down the road, with ongoing maintenance and fixes coming at regular intervals.
Failing to optimize all content formats for mobile
Depending on the kind of app you’re developing, you’ll need to optimize it for various forms of content your users will consume regularly. Newspaper apps need to feature perfectly scalable chunks of text, fast-loading quality images, and scalable graphs to suit the reader. Then again, all apps need to ensure that their in-app icons and text descriptions load perfectly and that their design is indeed user-friendly.
When developers get stuck with content presentation on their apps, they often reach out to design experts such as Infostarters that can help them scale their visual and verbal content into a single, seamless presentation. This makes for a major part of user experience, so you shouldn’t neglect that aspect of your app design and ensure that your users will be happy with every form of content they enjoy through your app.
Lack of research on the target market
As we’ve mentioned earlier, such a massive and fast-expanding market doesn’t mean that you should aim for the entire population, but find that sweet spot for what you can offer with your unique ideas. That, however, means that you need to know more about your potential users, other than that they use their mobile phones on a regular basis and belong to the four billion people mentioned above.
You need to find your ideal user, find out what they like, who they are, and how you can reach them. You need to design your app based on what they prefer, and not with a broad idea of how any app should look like. To appeal to a certain audience, you need to understand their preferences, and that requires ongoing market research. Although your initial research will help you pre-launch, you’ll need to continue evolving your knowledge base if you want to keep your app relevant to that audience later in the future. In addition to actually listening to the reviews and comments your users share, research is the key to successful mobile app development and great user experience.
While there are many other mistakes app developers can make in the process of crafting the next trendy interface and a brilliant service, these are the ones to cross off your “might do” list. Keep your development process streamlined and your users happy, and you’ll always be able to find a suitable market for your app!