9 Essential Tips When Choosing the Best Features for Your Mobile App
No business can consider itself competitive these days without assuring a mobile presence. As we all know, mobile presence starts with transforming your regular website into a responsive and mobile-optimized one. But until a business builds a fully operational mobile app for itself, the mobile presence does not get complete.
But even when unleashing a mobile app for your business, you need to ensure it remains equipped with features that users need. Instead of loading an app with too many features, a business should focus on features that their customers need. From mobile game development to building enterprise apps to creating consumer focused apps, developers need to focus on features that their audience appreciate most. Deciding and prioritizing the app features is one of the crucial parts of development. Over and above this, there are some key features that most business apps invariably need most of the times.
Here we explain how to choose and decide on the key features for your app.
1. Research well
Any engaging digital product is created not without conducting thorough research on the users, competition, market trends, success factors and pain points. You also need to have a detailed analysis of the available technologies and resources to achieve this goal. Prior to that, your objective for building the app should be clear.
For instance, the success of Sitecore in various business niche websites is a commendable thing. Research can reveal the ease of aggregating various marketing features within the platform makes it so well suited as a WCM.
2. Defining the purpose
It is also important to define the purpose of the website. What purpose it is going to serve and how the users are going to be benefited from the website, are two crucial considerations. Without defining the purpose clearly, you are likely not to make the product as compelling as it was supposed to be. How can your website address the needs of the users and deliver solutions to the pain points they come across? These considerations should play a major role in defining the purpose of your website. When you define the purpose clearly, you can address the user needs conclusively.
3. Prioritizing the features
Now when you have decided about the features you need, you need to ensure the most important features for your website to function smoothly. You have to prioritize the features as per the significance of each of them for your desired goal. One way to do that is to make a list of necessities and then set features for each one of them. Once you have made the priority list of features ready, it is time to decide on the tools and technologies to build and execute them for the respective website. A successful digital product will be equally awesome in concept, features, and execution.
4. Simple end user experience
Simplicity and user friendliness are two important principles of any website navigation. The developer must address the limitations and useful attributes of the respective platform. The time required for completing a specific task is crucial for the users to get delighted. With simplicity at work in the design layout and features, the app is likely to ensure optimum ease of use and least time for completing tasks. To continue delighting users quick loading time coupled up with loads of easy to use features will play a crucial role for business websites. For example, in ecommerce websites, the users should be able to access products easily and be able to complete the transaction as effortlessly as possible.
5. Cross platform capability
For every mobile app the main two platforms they need to ensure presence are respectively as iOS and Android. To deliver apps on both platforms most developers grab cross-platform frameworks instead of native development. Some of the most useful cross-platform frameworks for building apps on both of these platforms include PhoneGap, ReactNative, and NativeScript. Building apps with such frameworks will also have its distinct cost advantage besides ensuring the benefits of multi-platform presence.
6. Performance driven
The performance of an app is a crucial consideration for mobile apps. The apps should load and launch as quickly as within just a few seconds without allowing any waiting period for the app. The most important thing should be keeping the app optimized on a continuous basis and preventing any obstruction from interfering with the app performance.
7. Addressing security concerns
When it comes to building apps to ensure data security, businesses need to be extra careful. Safeguarding confidentiality of user information and complying with the legal norms is one of the most important requirements for business apps. So, protecting the app with protected signup process and ensuring proper authentication for important business data will remain important.
8. Offline work
These days most mobile apps find it extremely important to allow offline access to data at times when an internet connection is no longer available. Unavailability of connection can accidentally lead to loss of data and interfere with the continuation of work and this is precisely why offline access to data is important. In a complex corporate system or business app often offline access can allow working offline and saving and syncing online later when connected online. It is a crucial feature of an enterprise app.
9. Regular updates
To ensure continued improvement and constantly renewed focus as for how to make the app better with each day, an app needs to be updated often and at regular intervals. With ongoing development, it can be ensured that the app remains updated with constantly renewed features and content that help the user. With frequent updates, an app can also address all the pain points and performance glitches over a period of time. If you look at the majority of successful apps you are bound to recognize that they thrive with frequent updates.
Last but not the least of all consideration for a business app would be providing contact information in an easily accessible manner. It should not only be clearly visible but it is supposed to be easily used for calling or emailing with a single tap. Offering a chatbot for providing instant help is also another popular and helpful feature with many ecommerce and business apps.