4 Tips for Conveying Your Ideas to Your App Development Team

Featured article by Emily Roberts, Independent Technology Author

It is often said that if you can name it, there is an app for it. The greater challenge is communicating your vision to your developers so that they create the app you’re envisioning. This is especially true when you’re trying to create an app that does something truly novel or requires complex functionality and interactivity beyond what many cookie-cutter projects do. Here are 4 tips for conveying your ideas to your app development team:

Understand Your Business Plan

Apps are not like architectural wonders; just because you build it doesn’t mean they’ll come. In fact, apps are harder to sell than websites, even if they are free. Understand your business plan and how the app relates to that before you sit down with a developer.

For example, if you hope to earn money through in-app advertising, that’s how the app needs to be designed. To chop and change, switching to in-game purchases to fund the project essentially doubles the cost of the project. If you are using the app to provide access to premium content, it needs to provide access to that information while limiting the ability of the user to screen capture or share it.

Streaming media apps may be an extension of a podcast or radio show, allowing the creator to earn more money from product name drops in the content. Conversely, if your plan to monetise the app requires people paying to download it, developers need to know that, too.

Providing information such as “I want the app free to those who pay for my newsletter” or “I want the app to promote my book and paid content” affects the app’s design, even if you don’t know the technical details on how it would be implemented in the app.

Another factor to consider is how your app will differentiate itself from the literal thousands of other apps that do nearly the same thing yours does. What benefit do people derive from your app that they cannot get from others? Why would they use your app versus another?

If they gain access to otherwise restricted content, you’ve answered that question. If you’re providing information that no one else provides, your app will need to be designed to make that information prominent and ensure it is easily understood. If you are providing a unique business relationship with your customers, the developer needs to ensure that nothing interferes with that relationship; for example, an app showing where your stores are located and providing coupon codes shouldn’t let your rivals’ ads appear in the app.

Consider the benefits you’ll provide to the user as part of the monetisation scheme, so you can articulate this to the app developer. For example, if you want to push coupon codes and discounts to your app users to generate sales during otherwise slow times, this impacts the development of the app. If you’re going to use the app to share media that you create to generate ad revenue, ensure that the app presents advertising or recommended purchases in ways that aren’t blocked by anything else on the user’s device.

If you’re going to use the app to build customer engagement and word of mouth (or quick pic of user with product) marketing, you need to know from the start that you’ll need social media integration.

Create User Stories

You start with detailed demographics of your ideal customer and the most likely people to use your product. Then you create a composite customer to represent each market segment. When you have composite users, you can have that fictional person that everyone can visualise walk through various expected interactions with the app. Each of these scenarios is called a use case.

For instance, an example of a composite user could be the small business owner checking the price data from trusted sources before posting new products on e-commerce platforms. Or a harried parent checking up on a child through a secure app that protects everyone’s privacy. Or even a young adult checking the recommended activities in their area that fit in the free space in their calendar.

Based on the user story, you can imagine what they’d want to see and how they’d want the app to function. If it is a game for children, it is fun and entertaining without the kids being able to spend Mum’s money on in-game purchases. If it is a busy business owner, it provides critical information in a dashboard and the action buttons they’d want on that screen.

There’s another reason to be able to provide user stories with information on user demographics. If you’re imagining children playing the app or accessing data through it, the developers have to limit the information collected by the app and restrict the type of advertising that could be shown through the app.

On top of this, understanding the skill sets and knowledge of the average user affects the app’s design. If the average user is an Apple user, you’re going to build an app for the Apple App Store instead. If the average user has limited technological knowledge, you’re going to want the app to be installed seamlessly through an app store and update smoothly instead of requiring tech support.

You’d also avoid designing the app to require someone having to tweak settings on their phone to make the app work on their device. Apps aimed at teenagers and children may be subject to limits on the location information it can access or even prohibit someone from sharing images and videos through the app.

Have Flow Diagrams and Wire Frames

Wire frames are an architectural diagram for how the app will be designed. They can be used to visually display all of the inputs and outputs with the app. It should also include the flow of information, such as the sources of information coming in and where data is written or sent as actions occur.

Where will you get the latest headlines? Where will you be storing the content that will be pushed to users’ apps? How will you verify access to content you keep behind a firewall but let app users have access to for a specific period of time?

Flow diagrams explain how specific tasks are completed. You could have different flow diagrams for different users, such as when you have a freemium app that limits functions for those who don’t pay for the premium version. The final version of the app will need to incorporate all of these functions and information flows, but when you’ve defined all of them, the developer can combine as much as possible.

Work with Developers with Diverse Experience

Sometimes it really is them, not you. Why would a developer keep trying to use a simple structure for an app that needs to pull data from various, secure sources? Why would the developer try to build functions from a cookie-cutter program when you need something very different? In both cases, it could be because that’s all they know how to do. If you happen to live in the United Kingdom, the solution is to work with experienced app developers in the UK like The App Developers. They provide you with support every step of the way and have a band of designers that are ready to turn your vision into art.

If you want the app development process to go smoothly, follow the few tips in this article. Know your business plan before you do anything else and create user stories so that you can imagine the various likely users and their use case scenarios. Also, use flow diagrams and wireframes to explain the information you want coming in and out and how you want systems to interact. And last, but not least, make sure that you work with developers who can do more than use little more than code-free app design to build apps, so that they can build the app you want instead of relying on the familiar tools they want to use.