Mobile apps have already penetrated almost every nook and corner of our everyday life and business operation. Mobile apps continue to make traditional media and entertainment experience outdated, revitalise sales and marketing for countless businesses, transform education, deliver a never-before shopping experience for retail customers, streamline business operation and make our life smarter with easy to engage digital interactions and tools. No wonder, every business irrespective of the size and niche is developing its own mobile app.
But mobile apps represent an array of sophisticated and future-ready technologies across the spectrum. From Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) to intelligent chatbots powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to voice interface and smart digital assistants, every business is focused on utilising these new technologies through their branded mobile app and shaping their brand presence.
In Ireland, a lot of small businesses started shaping their brand presence through unique mobile apps. Whether it is mobile app development in Dublin or other cities, the country sets a nice example of how small business apps are at the forefront of redefining customer experience.
No doubt, every business while building their mobile app needs to choose their hi-tech features as per their audience, target market, particular business objectives and constraints. No business can engage an audience and boost sales conversion through a ‘one size fits all kind of mobile app. An app needs to be highly business-specific, from its design attributes to the feature set.
What are the key considerations for developing a highly customised and business-specific app and redefining the customer experience completely? Let’s explain.
An extensive audience and competitor research
Your business, even if it looks similar in product and service offerings with several others, has many differences with all of them. Just like individuals, every business is intrinsically different and hence your app cannot be similar to any of your competitor apps.
Your app must find a special reason for the audience of your competitor apps to prefer your app. The reason can be totally different from their reasons to use the apps from your competitors. Understanding this unique value proposition is key to the success of your business-specific app.
Once you know who is going to find your app useful and the special reason for them to use your app instead of other similar apps in the same niche, you actually have found the key to success. For this besides knowing your audience, you need to have a deeper understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of your competitor apps.
Go slow, develop the app in layers and overtime
Do you want to avoid taking the wrong step or do away with the risks of being perceived with a negative notion in the beginning? Yes, that’s a valid concern because once your app is out and you failed to impress your audience, course correction will only add to the delays and development cost while making it more difficult for the app to withstand the onslaught of competition.
This is why when building a business app make sure you just focus on the core relevance and value proposition instead of focusing on too many features and UX attributes. Build the most elementary app that precisely does what the core app objective promises and leave room for further value additions and alterations based on the audience feedback.
Yes, this is what is widely referred to as the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) approach to app development. You can shape the user experience of an app incrementally over time through audience validated updates. This will help you prevent taking any wrong decisions regarding the app development while helping you strictly follow what your audience perceives best for the app.
Choose your development approach and technology stack wisely
If you want to redefine customer experience with your business app, you need to deliver a lot more than what other apps are already offering. But the first condition is to stand equal to successful apps in your niche in terms of performance. You can incorporate a lot of innovative features, but if the app fails to load quickly or a certain feature just doesn’t work right, you just end up falling at the bottom. This is why, considering the foundation of an app, namely the choice of OS platform, development approach and technology stack are important.
You can build singular native apps for each platform separately or you can build one single hybrid app that runs on multiple platforms. The native development is great for optimum performance but involves greater cost and resources for initial development as well as for all future updates. Hybrid development just rescues you from the huge development cost and maintenance challenges of native development, but it can only deliver a very dull “one size fits all” kind of user experience and inconsistent performance across platforms.
This is why today’s businesses are preferring a middle path offered by cross-platform development. As per this approach, you can build one single app for multiple platforms by utilising the maximum portion of the core codebase but each platform-specific app version will also utilise the native UI layer and a significant portion of native code. Thus cross-platform development actually allows you to develop one app for multiple platforms without missing the native user experience and performance.
When it comes to technology stack for native development, platform-specific technologies are already well known and developers do not have many options to deviate from these choices. For hybrid development, there are several great choices and particularly Ionic stands ahead of others. As for cross-platform development, you have the two most popular and dominant choices, such as React Native and Flutter.
Redefine the customer experience through personalisation
How can a business make the customer remember the brand longer? How can a business brand create an impression that doesn’t fade away very quickly? Well, it is through the personalised user experience that an app makes customers happy and content. So, if you want to redefine customer experience through your business app, make sure you utilise every scope to personalise the experience as per their preference, contexts and needs.
Here are some time tested ways to personalise app user experience.
- You can create a great sense of personalised app experience in onboarding by incorporating customer names and other customer attributes wherever applicable.
- Make sure users can set and personalise notification and other settings.
- Send personalised notifications based on user behaviour data, user context and other data-driven insights.
- Personalise in-app messages in content and tone to engage users instantly.
- Allow personalising app content as per the user preference.
- Use personalised product, service, content and media recommendations based on previous usage, purchases, search behaviour and data-driven insights on intent.
- Give the customers a feeling of ownership for the app by choosing their own quick-access menus and layout of content.
Conclusion
Last but not least piece of advice is to follow the industry-acclaimed development practices for the app project. Building a business-specific app that resonates with the customer sensibilities and creates room for increased brand following and engagement is not easy. This is why, before jumping onto the development, get abreast of the best development practices that are making rounds in the app world.
