What is the process for building an app? How should you plan your time and activities as a software entrepreneur? Today, we’re covering 6 stages of building an app for your small business.
As a small business owner, you may be thinking about building an app to reach a bigger audience or add more value. But if you’ve never built an app before, you may not know what to expect. So here is a rough overview of the different stages you’ll go through when building your app.
Concept Validation and Research
Concept Validation is possibly the most important step in building your app. The goal of concept validation is to make sure that your app is the app the market needs. It’s really important to be honest with yourself and detach yourself emotionally from the app concept. You need to be committed to building the app the market needs, not the app you think the market needs. Not every app idea is a good idea. Why? Because many ideas do not solve a true problem for the target audience.
You want to make sure you’re going to build the right app for the right person. The first step is to identify and reach out to your target user. Then find out if they perceive the problem you’re trying to solve as a problem worth solving, and more importantly, worth paying for. You want to try to understand what is going on in their head, how are they currently solving the problem? How much do they currently spend? How often do they encounter the problem? One point of emphasis, as you talk with these people, keep the conversation about reality, what has actually happened. Don’t use hypothetical scenarios, otherwise it could mess up the information you receive and people will give you false positives to protect your feelings.
One tool that is extremely useful is the Value Proposition Canvas by Strategyzer. This helps to capture your assumptions and then validate, or invalidate, them as you talk to your target user. As you go through this exercise you’ll also need to map out and be aware of the pains, gains, and jobs of the target user. The goal is to be able to describe the target user and the role of your app in their life and how it will help them overcome their struggles. For more information read Preparing to Develop Your App.
Features and Requirements
Now that you have confirmed your app idea really is a good idea, one that solves the pains of the target audience, you’ll need to figure out the features and requirements for your app. You’ll want to begin mapping out features that will be the most valuable to the users.
Start this process by going over the customer jobs from the Value Proposition Canvas. Take their jobs, and write out, step by step, what they would do on your app (if it were in front of them) to solve their problems. In effect, you’ll want to turn their customer jobs into epics. An epic is a collection of individual steps or “user stories” describing what the user needs to do in your app. After writing out the epics, break them down into user stories by writing out the simple statements of “clicking here, typing there, opening this, saving that. ). If you’d like to learn more, check out this article, User Story Writing.
By making user stories, you can explore various requirements that may have been hidden before you had made the stories. For example, you’re a translator working on a new platform to translate a document from English to French. You finish your work and then submit it to an admin. What happens if the admin rejects my work or has feedback? What happens in the negative scenarios? Going through use cases like that will help bring out new system requirements.
Design
Small business have the advantage of speed. Once the user stories have been mapped out, you can hand them off to a UX designer. When you do that, make sure to also share any brand guidance with the UX designer to help them interpret your brand into the UX design. You’ll want to share logos, typefaces, colors, emotions … anything to help the user feel like they are immersing themselves in your brand.
At that point, the designer should review all the user stories so they can understand how the app and the features work. During this process they may point out user stories that should be included, or some that may have been missed.
Next, the UX designer will build a feature library that shows how buttons, fields, text, drop-downs, and other interactive elements will look in the app. Depending on the designer, they may also build wireframes, which are empty layouts of screens without color. This is not required, but it is a great advantage to have because it will help explore functionality quickly without spending time on brand interpretation.
By the end, the UX designer will provide you with a set of high-fidelity, full-color mockups that the development team can use and interpret. There are several online platforms you can use to design your mockups. Here we like using Figma.
Before you move on, you need to consider one more aspect of design: the technical design. Have your lead developer or architect look over the stories and mockups. Have them draw an architecture diagram that shows which technology components will be needed to bring this app to life, as well as how those components will interact with each other. It’s like creating a game plan, it will help the developers as they build the app so they know what needs to be done and where.
Development and Testing
Now that you have your user stories, mockups, and architecture, you are ready to have developers start coding.
Communicate with your developers daily. In this stage, communication will be one of the most important aspects, good communication will save you from a lot of stress down the road.
To help with this, we recommend that you manage your work in a system like JIRA or Trello. In those programs, you’ll be able to establish a simple workflow, or process, for building out each user story. When we work to build an app, our flow is: design, back-end development, front-end development, integration, testing (QA), user acceptance testing (UAT), done. Your flow doesn’t need to match ours, this is just what we have seen work for us, but what is important is that you have a flow that works for you.
As the developers begin to build your app, have them commit their work daily. The reason behind this is so that you can check their work or they can check each other’s work. The sooner you’ll be able to discover problems as they arise, the sooner you can fix them. Do not let your developers sit on code for days or weeks at a time. In many software teams today, developers start coding at the beginning of their day, and then commit their work at the end of the day.
One last bit on this section is that you’ll want a good software tester. Yes, you can do some of the testing and spot checking yourself. But get someone who is experienced. This is not something that you want to try and save money on. A good tester will greatly improve the quality of your app. Think of it as an investment into your own app. Read more about The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Software Testing.
Launch
Finally, we get to launch the app! But launching means more than just deploying your app. Launching your app includes all your technical deployment tasks, but also includes preparing your user base to start using your app (which should be done in advance), as well as preparing your app store listing so you can distribute your app to Apple and Android users through the app store (again, should be done in advance). To learn more, read Understanding the App Development Timeline. Basically launching means everything it takes to bring your app and the users together.
With all the pre-launch activities, communication and planning is key. If you forget to prepare, you might have to delay your launch up to a month, or maybe worse! So consider things like when and how will you communicate with your users about what. Will you send a pre-launch email campaign to announce your beta test start date? One thing that has been helpful for us, is using a pre-launch checklist that helps us organize all the necessary information so that we are prepared.
One pre-launch activity that is crucial for your success, is setting up support for your app. You need to have this in place before you can operate. You’ll need a place where users can report problems and get help.
Operations
After launch, you begin operations. The main goal here is to maintain and improve your app and the servers it runs on. With app support, they need to be able to reach you, through phone, email, chat, or instant messaging. In addition to reporting problems, users may also suggest new features. That’s feedback you want! With each report, you can turn to your developers so they can find a solution and then get ready to release a new update.
The more you work with building and running apps, the more you realize that it is not so much an event, as it is an ongoing process. The app will grow with the company and become an essential part of business operations. It will be vital to how you reach out and connect to your target market. There are so many possibilities for you and your company as you begin to explore how you will create value through apps. So, get going!
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