What to consider when building an app or digital product for your business

It’s been clear for some time that shifting digital experiences to mobile is essential to extend your reach to customers, regardless of sector or industry. It might seem sensible in that case to develop and publish a mobile app or digital product as part of your technical roadmap.

Whether you’re a large corporation looking to streamline your service, or a small SME trying to get ahead of the game, developing an app can be a costly project to take on and when you’ve done it, you may be tempted to sit back and reap the rewards.

Unfortunately, it’s not that easy.

To ensure your product is successful, the creation and development of the application only makes up a small part of the overall digital strategy.

You don’t just build an app. You need to create a Mobile ecosystem

Innovation may be the buzzword everyone wants to include in their future digital transformation plans, but more often than not your product isn’t about being trendy in the short term, you need it to solve a problem and add real, tangible value to your service offering. So rather than overcomplicate the solution by injecting the latest augmented reality or artificial intelligence, work on simplifying the challenges your users face.

Designing a functional and scalable backend solution, integrating the new software into your existing tech stack, developing test scripts and support for User Acceptance Testing, all of this and more will need to be considered and by doing so, will economise your budget in the long term.

The additional costs no-one ever wants to talk about.

It doesn’t matter whether you’ve built your app with us, another agency or in-house, once your app is live, it is just that: Alive. And it requires attention, nurturing and a good backbone to keep it running efficiently and effectively for your business.

At Indiespring, we educate all our customers on the importance of avoiding app rot: a serious condition that happens all too often when apps are left in their original state, never to be looked at again.

Over time, the expensive code you invested in will deteriorate as each platform regularly updates their OS, new devices come to market and the app begins to lose areas of functionality or in the most extreme of circumstances, stop performing altogether.

Actions to take before you design and build your app

If you are at the start of your mobile app development process, there are a few points you should know before beginning your project:

What problem is your digital product going to solve?
Have you got enough time to design, build and test?
Do you have the budget not just for the build, but to also maintain?

These three questions will kickstart the discussions with your development partner. Understanding the initial problem is critical and your support and involvement at the start will pave the way to finding the right Mobile-First solution for your digital experience or product.

Once the budget is in place and timelines are agreed, the project from there can move into the hands of an experienced software development team. Online hosting platforms where the apps will run from change and evolve so it’s essential the team have the knowledge to build a robust ecosystem to enable your app to live a long and successful life.

Are you looking to build a digital product for your business? Not sure if a mobile app is right for you?
Speak to our expert team +44 (0) 161 660 6756