8 Pitfalls to Avoid While Business App Development
As Paul William “Bear” Bryant, a renowned American college football player and coach, stated, ‘When you make a mistake, there are only three things you should ever do about it: admit it, learn from it, and don’t repeat it.’ Business app development is a challenging task. SMEs bet on the importance of mobile apps in the modern business environment. Still, many of them tend to ignore principles for developing and make common mistakes that directly affect business processes as a whole.
We have already written about what type of application to choose, and mobile app development trends that will rock in 2020.
In this post, OpenGeekLab is going to showcase common pitfalls that you need to avoid so that your mobile application can hit the charts, target a completely new audience, and generate new revenue streams.
Common Pitfalls in Business App Development
1. Is Mobile App Development for Small Business a Need or Desire?
You must accurately define ultimate business targets and user requirements to see if your application fulfills them. Business mobile application development is an expensive and time-consuming process. If your application has no demand, your business may suffer significant financial losses.
2. Not Doing In-Depth Market Research
When it comes to business mobile app development, you should be aware of what purpose your app is going to serve, what would it take to develop it, how much time it would take.
You should also consider possible shortcomings: cybersecurity issues, time to acquire a clientele base, supply and demand balance maintenance, technical, and deployment issues. A move towards mobile apps for small business owners with in-depth market analysis allows getting all the necessary information in advance so that you can cope with problems even before they appear and save tons of finances.
3. Bad Briefs
Your final results directly depend on how you present your objectives at the very beginning. Showcase functional and non-functional requirements, set of use cases, user interactions that the software must provide via flowcharts, diagrams, or sample sketches of the screens.
Explain what has to happen when users click a specific button, which screen should appear after a particular action, as well as all that you want implement in an app. Providing contractors with the helicopter view of a project allows ensuring workflow without overspending, idles, skips, delays.
4. Unrealistic Budget Expectations
The mobile segment is continually changing, representing brand new technologies like AI, VR, and VR. All that makes building a mobile app more challenging, time- and resource-intensive.
Finding and hiring experienced contractors will be a win-win option. Depending on your app functionality and complexity, the development process may take from several weeks to several months. A preliminary overall budget assessment, discussions regarding requirements, and decision-making with contractors will allow you to plan developing an app for your business up to the cent.
5. Forgetting About a Proper UI/UX Design
If you forget about a proper UI/UХ design focused on user-centered and effective problem-solving solutions, this may cost the life of your app. Design is no longer about the wow factor. It is about personalization, simplicity, convenience, minimalism, accessibility. Keep things simple, and your users will rely on your app and follow your brand.
6. Avoiding Cross-Platform App Development Strategy
There was a time when creating small business mobile apps for only one platform has been the only possible way. But that time has passed. Today, with advanced cross-platform tools, such as React Native, mobile app developers can simultaneously create custom mobile apps for business for Android/iOS using single source code to deploy on multiple platforms. Tech biggies like Tesla, Airbnb, Samsung, and Wix are actively pursuing React Native as it allows reducing costs up to 30%, shortening time to market 1.8 times, providing quick product updates.
7. Feature Overload
If you believe that customers like applications with all the features that you can think of, then it’s all in your head. Feature overload will make an application cumbersome. Moreover, each new function may increase costs and development time, slow down app performance. And, as a result, may be useless for users.
That’s why you should focus on some unique functions and features to live up to customers’ expectations, not just to fit in. Pursue quality, not quantity. If needed, you can introduce extra features, update current ones, as well as optimize them based on user feedback.
8. Poor Marketing Strategy
If you do not have a reliable marketing strategy for small business app development, then you waste your money, time and efforts for nothing. Creating a strong online platform where you can connect with your consumers is not enough. Explore your audience. Present a consistent brand voice over all available social media channels. Get quality customer feedback. Make your brand visual. Team up with an influencer to market your app effectively.
Use the Benefits of Mobile Apps for Business to the Fullest
All of the above pitfalls may be a severe obstacle to mobile application success. But you can safely undertake an app creation if you have a clear product purpose and an experienced team to deliver solutions, not just technologies that best suit your business case. Just drop us a line! We will be happy to offer you a compelling vision.
