The key stages of app development explained

Perhaps you’re developing an app for your team members or existing customers – or maybe your app will be the core product of a new business. Whatever the market for your app, you need to know exactly what it will do.

Start by defining the app’s ‘value proposition’. How will the app provide value to users.

The most successful apps tend to have very clear value propositions – e.g. ‘Candy Crush Saga is a fun and accessible game’; ‘Uber lets you order a taxi using your phone’.

Write a succinct value proposition that captures the core purpose of your planned app.

When your app idea is sufficiently well defined for the first stages of development, you can assemble the team who will work on the app. It’s likely you’ll take one of three approaches:

1. Work with an agency. Choose an app development agency which meets your project requirements.
2. Employ a team of app developers. If you choose this approach, first make sure you have enough app expertise in your HR team to make good hires.
3. The ‘apptrepreneur’ approach (for startups). Assemble a small team of co-founders, including a team member who will lead on development.

We can think of each person involved in building the app as a stakeholder. All of the stakeholders must agree on how the app will be developed, and what exactly the project will deliver. You may choose to write these agreements into contracts or by creating a well defined project brief.

Think carefully about each factor, and try to put time and research into your responses.

Once the development team has nailed down enough key information about your aims for the app, they can start prototyping some assets to show how the app idea could work. These might include:

• Wireframes – 2D screens showing the planned layout of key frames of the app
• Hifi prototypes – a rich app prototype which offers something close to the user experience of the finished app
• PoC (proofs of concept) – demonstrations of specific technical features of the planned app

The prototype assets can be used to help all project stakeholders – from developers and designers to investors and management – to understand the project. This is a great opportunity to share the premise with the target audience to get early feedback before the development cycle.

This is the stage of app development where we design the app’s user interface (UI), which means the interactive parts of the app. At the same time, we consider the app’s user experience (UX), which refers to the quality of experience a person has when they use the app.

The creatives on your team will create designs including:

• UI Components
• Screen designs
• Navigation
• Animations (e.g. load screens)
• Copy (the words that guide people while they use the app)

This will take into account your existing branding and brand guidelines (if you have them). And it’s likely that you’ll also take inspiration from other brands’ apps which you admire.

The team should also carefully craft the user journeys of people using the app – planning how the user can get from A to B (or C, D, Etc.) as smoothly as possible.

Throughout the Design stage, it’s important to factor in the app’s use cases, current UI/UX trends, and human-computer interaction (HCI) best practices.

The Development stage is where we turn the app design into the first full, working version of your app.

How we get there will depend on your work methodology. At The Distance, we use a tailored process based partly on the techniques of agile project management, which delivers development work in an activity cycle made up of relatively small ‘releases’. The tasks identified as most valuable to the project are prioritised in each release.

During each cycle, the development team produces code that will form the app, working closely with the testing team who will later fully review the launch version of the app (Stage #5: Testing). All of the stakeholders review the release, and contribute their feedback and ideas to feed into the next cycle of development.

Initial development culminates with the completion of the first full iteration of the app – although there’ll be room for much more development work after testing and launch (Stage #7: Ongoing work).

Before an app launches to its audience, it should go through a rigorous testing process – sometimes referred to as Quality Control (QC).

Every user-facing feature of the app will need to be tested. This includes all of the frontend features that users will interact with – the UI – and also the backend features that your team will work with, such as the app’s content management system (CMS).

While some aspects of app QC can be automated, much of the work is still done manually, in order to accurately reflect human critical values.

The QC analysts who do all this manual testing may belong to the same agency as your developers – or they could be sourced from a third party. The former option helps with communication between developers and the QC team, whereas the latter option provides the benefit of a fresh perspective.

By the end of the QC process, your team may have flagged errors, bugs, inconsistencies and areas for improvement in the app’s UI and UX. It’s important to catch potential problems like these before they can cause bad experiences for real users – the people who you want to retain and encourage to give good ratings and referrals for the app.

Many app development projects will cycle through the Development and Testing stages multiple times before progressing to Launch.

Some apps are launched on one platform initially, before adding other platforms later. For example, Instagram was available only for iOS for the first year-and-a-half of its existence.

Launch also involves marketing the app to new prospective users (or if it’s for internal company use, communicating about it with team members). This is a whole subject in itself, but briefly, your methods might include:

• Creating a landing page or website to promote the app.
• PR, including reaching out to journalists, and publishing press releases
• Social media advertising
• SEO and paid search advertising
• App store optimisation (ASO) – the process of optimising your app store listings, with the aim of attracting downloads from high-value, highly-relevant users

With all this work completed, you should allow yourself a moment of celebration!

But don’t celebrate too hard, as there’s still lots of work ahead.

App development is complicated – especially during the initial build of the app. It’s highly advisable to have a project manager in place who can steer the development process and keep everyone on-board with your chosen work methodology.

You might employ your own project manager to deliver your app project – or you might use the project management capacity within your chosen app development agency. Both options have their merits. Using your own project manager maximises the ‘voice’ of your company within the project, while using a project manager from the agency’s side ensures that a high level of app development expertise goes into decisions on how the project is managed.

Whether or not you use a project manager, be sure to bear in mind the stages of app development which we’ve outlined in this guide. Each phase is indispensable to any successful app project. And having that broad-brush plan in-place will give every stakeholder a feel for how far they’ve come, and what still needs to be done in order to deliver a great app.

If you are interested in seeing your app idea become a reality, get in touch and speak to one of our experienced team members. They will provide you with advice and guidance and get the ball rolling on your business’ exciting new app project.