What Makes an App Great?

A well-developed mobile application can boost the growth of your business by offering a seamless user experience to customers.

The mere development of an app isn’t sufficient to attract customers as you have to ensure that the app undergoes a robust development mechanism ingrained with the right features.

The user experience can eventually be enhanced if you focus on certain parameters such as app design, enhanced app performance, and many more.

The Ultimate Power of a Robust Application

The app market is flooded with an abundance of applications. You’d be amazed to know that earlier in 2020, there were around 3 million apps on the Google Play Store, the number has subsequently risen to a humongous 5 million and is expected to grow tremendously.

With the plethora of applications, the competition is intense. Businesses are struggling to ace the market by developing strong applications to enhance user engagement and boost revenue of the businesses.

However, it isn’t easy to fit into the market and successfully cater to the needs of customers, as some businesses miserably fail because they aren’t able to serve any business purpose or their product isn’t feasible.

Hence, it becomes extremely important to make your application stand out in the market by delivering an intuitive user experience, fast performance, and elegant layouts to get an edge over the competition.

There’s another underlying issue in the app development industry, and that is the ease of technology.

The more technology is easily accessible, the more the overabundance of software will eventually restrict the user’s attention.

Businesses should focus on successfully delivering the message or purpose to users rather than merely focusing on developing the app.

Developing a successful application requires some key features to top up the market game. A successful development of an application isn’t just user-centric; it also should be developed while keeping the market and product in focus.

When an application successfully construes the elements such as market, product, and user, it will eventually lead to enhanced usability, and performance, and will add value to the product.

Deep analysis of applications and how they can fit into the market is extremely important. Here are a few key features that you should consider to build a robust application:

1. Outstanding User Interface

Just like a book is judged by its cover, an app is judged by its user interface. The more appealing the user interface, the more likely users are to use it in the first instance.

The success of an application can be analyzed by the way the user interface of that application has turned out to be.

If your application does not perform well or stand up to the expectations and requirements of users, the chances of failure of the application increase.

Having an awesome and attractive user interface doesn’t imply that your application should be flooded with a host of features and should be aesthetic.

This is quite a misconception that most businesses implement in their applications. They flood their application with tons of features, which eventually leads to disappointment in users as most end users operate the application from their mobile phones, which have small touch screens.

Hence, it’s highly recommended to keep the features and design minimalistic. If you feel like some features wouldn’t add value to the application, eliminate them.

The more you add invaluable and complex features, the more the users will be reluctant to use them.

In fact, according to Shopify, more than 65% of users are likely to leave the application in just a few seconds because of poor design.

Always ensure that you emphasize enough app design, visual animation, graphic design, and sound quality way ahead of development.

Focus on the main features and leave the discrete features behind to ensure that you don’t overstuff the app.

Also, there’s a general rule of thumb to consider, which is to add the features that your users might find relevant, and if your app has got more than one category, make sure you focus on the primary categories.

Example

2. High Performing and Fast Loading Applications

Users disregard using an app that takes a million times to load. It’s quite obvious that no user would love to wait for an app to open.

A fraction of a second can kill the mood of the user. If your app takes forever to open or gets crashed or gets shut down, no user will ever get back to the complicated navigation of the app.

There’s a rule of thumb that an application shouldn’t take more than five seconds to load, just like a website. If your application takes more than 4-5 seconds to load, make sure you eliminate or cut down on some trivial features.

If you’re developing a complex application like Facebook or Instagram, it would require a tad longer time to load due to a large amount of data, make sure you take the users to the loading screen by informing them about the loading process. It will also ensure that the user sticks to the app.

Make sure you keep the application highly functional and consistent. We live in an era when almost everyone is multitasking and expect everything to work with a single click, including the application. Users expect it too.

They want that the application should open and function in real-time.

Example

Flipboard is a renowned social magazine that keeps users updated on the latest news, topics, and events. What makes this application stand out is how the platform brings the latest updates in a magazine format. How interesting?

In fact, users can later catch up on news and stories by saving them in their magazines.

The performance of the app is quite great as it reduces data usage to deliver an enhanced browsing experience. The performance of the application is quite fast.

3. Backed by Great Customer Support

What if a user while operating an application comes across a bug or doesn’t know how to operate it? The first thing that he will do is to contact customer service to resolve the query.

If customer support isn’t great or takes a long time to respond, the chances of users leaving the application would be high.

An application backed by great customer support will respond as soon as possible to keep the users hooked.

Initially, resolving one query might lead to an app recommendation. To ensure the smooth response of queries, you could either create a FAQ section or build chatbots through machine learning for better interaction of users.

Example

When it comes to giving flawless customer service, no company can beat Starbucks. What phenomenal customer service they offer! They have always delivered the best customer service.

The employees of Starbucks are advised to look into each drink before delivering it. Whatever drink a customer orders, the drink has to be prepared in a precise pattern.

In addition, their stores will give you a unique look, be it furniture or lighting. Everything is sleek.

The best part is that they remember each customer’s name and their previous orders, which is just great! Who doesn’t like to be remembered?

4. Consider Your Target Audience When Designing an App

Just like selling any product without knowing your target audience is destined to be futile, developing an application without knowing its purpose and target audience would be worthless.

When you haven’t got insights about the purpose it would serve and the requirements of your target audience, it wouldn’t make sense and would eventually fail.

Narrow down your research ahead of the development of an application to who will be your target audience and how they’re going to reap the benefit of it.

To cut to the chase, you can also narrow it down based on the demographics.

You need to garner every relevant piece of information to boil it down to the purpose that it’s going to serve the users.

There are indefinite apps available on the play store and competition is at stake as millions of businesses are struggling to make their apps the best and thrive in the market.

You can only sustain yourself in the market when you can deliver the required services and meet the expectations of the users.

According to the US Mobile App Report, the primary customers or app purchasers are in the age group of 18–30. If you’re looking forward to selling your application, focus on this age group.

However, if you have got different target audiences of different demographics, make sure you do enough research to ensure the viability of the application.

Besides, a crucial parameter to consider ahead of developing an application is language. Language can become a huge turn-off parameter for the users if it acts as an obstacle for the users to understand.

In addition, don’t get carried away with just identifying the target audience before app development. Make sure to evaluate the customer base every time you add a new feature or introduce a new update to the app.

Check your user base and approach them for feedback for a better understanding of their requirements.

If you want to dig deeper, the best thing you could do is to check and respond to their reviews, or you can interview the users for a crystal clear understanding.

Always go up with necessary updates instead of making any discrete updates, resulting in sloppy apps.

5. Maintain Utmost Privacy

Cybercrime is increasing due to an increase in hampering data. Privacy has become the utmost concern of users.

According to research conducted by Dot Com Infoway (DCI), more than 29% of users prefer uninstalling an application due to the high risk of malware and increasing security issues.

To ensure that you keep the security protection at the top, make sure that your users are quite aware of your privacy policy and what you will share, and what security protections you will offer.

However, it doesn’t imply that you have to keep intruding on messages about security and privacy. Instead, keep the privacy policy crystal clear so that any user can easily understand it.

In addition, once you inform the users about the privacy policy, it’s time to implement these policies by keeping your app safe from malware with consistent updates.

Also, whenever there’s a new threat or hack, make sure you release an update while keeping the users informed about the new updates.

Conclusion

You must have become aware of the importance of incorporating the necessary features in an application and not overcrowding the app while maintaining a subtle and attractive UI.

The catch is to identify the right or optimum features that you’re wishing to incorporate. It massively depends on what kind of app you’re building and who your target audience is.

Once you identify the target audience, it gets crystal clear to narrow down your app’s main features and eliminate the unnecessary ones.

Always ask your audience for valuable feedback, as it will give you a good idea of what they need and what you need to work on to meet their expectations.

Also, keep up with the changes in the app with evolving market trends to ensure that the app remains updated with the latest trends and isn’t missing out on any.

Lastly, never overlook the UI of an app as it’s the first impression and will perhaps pique the interest of the audience in the first instance. Keep it aesthetically pleasing and minimalistic.!