Once your brain achieves “mobile thinking”, you can try to make your app with simple tools and methodologies.
A good starting point when you have found the “job to be done” by the app is to draw the screens of the apps on a wireframe. It will allow you to count every possible step and interaction within the app. You can then test these possible paths with friends to know if it would match an actual behavior.
Making the paths easy to understand and simplify as much as possible the app will help to make a good “user experience” (UX). As a senior app director said: “Slap yourself in the face every time you add a button”, and it should be fine.
At this stage and if you’re happy with it, you should have a simple app, easy to use and to understand by potential customers. You can try to make a demo for it with tools such as AppDemoStore, which will make it visibly an app with every interaction. You can try and discuss on this “almost-real” basis.
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Let’s try to add conversion points. Every time you create or add a value, we’ll try to add a way for the client, the brand, to get insights, data or interaction from the user, thus “converting” him into a potential lead. Conversion points can be very different, and will depend on the business or marketing objective of the client (hint: “I want an app” is not a business or marketing objective”).
So, you have an app, with a benefit for the user (the job to be done) and for the client (conversion points). Can we go and have a rest? Quite not, in fact, probably between 20 and 50% of the budget should go to marketing your app. As seen before on this blog, there’s no way to make your app go straight to the top places of your category (see Appstore Economics).
But mobile comes with mobile advertising, which can be quite powerful given the huge number of data generated by users every day. Check out for instance what Amobee is doing with well designed mobile advertising. You can – and must – find a way to market your app within the marketing channels of your client.
You’re almost done! Find a way to share the marketing burden with the client (who has its owned channels and budgets for this), take a look at the Appstore Economics, and track stats on Flurry or AppAnnie, tweak the prices, get some coverage, and remember, it’s your first app, build on it, and make another one even better, as Rovio’s Angry Birds was their 52nd iteration 🙂
Martin Pasquier