According to one recent study, a significant 72% of all mobile app-based products fail to perform at a level to where they meet their initial expectations. That’s not to say that these apps are bad, necessarily. Their designers likely focused on many of the right things – from the sleek and sophisticated user interface to the user experience they were trying to offer to the problem they were trying to help people solve.
It’s just that they failed to focus on one of the most important things, which in truth should be the very first thing you devote your attention to: research.
Make no mistake about it – if you begin the mobile app development process, you cannot craft the solid foundation upon which the rest of the app will be built. The insight gleaned from that research should inform every decision you make thereafter and if it doesn’t exist, neither does an app that genuinely improves people’s lives.
Breaking Down Your Research, One Step at a Time
After you know what target you’re trying to hit (meaning that you know what your end users are going to expect your app to do), you need to research nearly every other thing about your target market. Don’t just look at the end users themselves – look at your competitors. Who are they? How long have they been around? What strategy are they currently employing? What makes them unique? What are they doing really well and, more importantly, what could they be doing better?
All of this will help you identify not only the target you should be trying to hit, but the gaps that exist within that target. At that point, you have everything you need to know what to focus on in order to not only create a complete solution, but one that is fresh and that offers a unique selling point that others aren’t currently serving.
Then, you need to think about the people you’re going to be offering your app to – a group that needs to be as narrow and as specific as you can get it. In order to make the right decisions during the design process, you need to be able to answer questions like “why would people actively want to use this solution over another?” “What, in their eyes, would be the key functionality?” “What would get them to use this service as a mobile app, versus some other type of platform like a web-based application?”
Once you’ve researched these two key areas, a lot of the other choices will begin to reveal themselves. Suddenly, picking between the many different monetization options available to you will no longer be difficult – the answer should more or less be clear. If you know your audience, you know whether or not they want a “free-mium” model or if they’re will to pay up front. You know if they’re willing to run with in-app purchases, or if a subscription model is more in line with what they’re expecting.
Conducting your research as early in the process as possible is the key to making sure you don’t make critical mistakes later on. Yes, your mobile app should always begin with a problem in search of a solution instead of the other way around – this doesn’t change that. But by filling in these critical gaps in your understanding now, you won’t just be able to arrive at something that exceeds expectations at the end of the process – you’ll have streamlined and optimized the process, too, enabling you to get that product out to your audience as fast as you possibly can.
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