Creating apps for smartphones: what are the differentials for a better user experience?

Worldwide the application market has grown expressively since 2021, having a significant amount of investments. Social media apps such as TikTok and YouTube are yet at the top of the list of smartphone apps. However, other categories have gained prominence as the market expands.

According to the Pew Research Center research, Brazil’s market is in the top 2 on application development for smartphones. This growth brings the possibility for old and new businesses to expand as it increases the contact with the final consumer. Although many businesses have their own app it is necessary to have some requirements checked in order to assure a good user experience.

In this article, we will mention some potential markets that have been growing with applications and what are some differentials for user experience.

Which app categories are in the spotlight?

Retail

While searching for a certain application users want to have their problem solved easily and practically. Thus, the retail app market might be a way to expand the number of clients.

Beyond food delivery apps, grocery stores, and home products, this category can be applied to other businesses that can scale up their operations and service provision.

The claim for these apps is to have their customer needs quickly tackled, for this reason, it is fundamental that users easily navigate the app, finding the desirable features effortlessly. These elements can be differentials for new user retention.

Education

As remote work expands eLearning also becomes a possibility for users. Language courses, online learning platforms, and applications for study organization are some of the opportunities in this field.

Moreover, for schools that have a solid in-person education system having an app can play a role as a competitive advantage in their student's experiences such as providing extra materials, a questions section, follow-up learning tools, or the student's records in the institution.

People who seek these solutions have a focus on more autonomy and control of their own learning process, beyond the flexibility that online tools provide.

Habits

Lastly, this category is also a possibility for those who want to digitalize some daily personal routines such as financial organization, task tracking, and general habits.

The advantage of these apps is that users have always their cellphones in hand, thus, using notifications and an iterative design might contribute to engaging app use.

Which process can assure a better user experience?

Product Processes

In this article, we will cover some of the product processes that help in creating a good application.

The first step consists in having a good understanding of the users, which means understanding their daily bases and use contexts. Thus, interviews and frequent feedback sessions are fundamentals.

Another vital aspect is during the product discovery phase the expectations from the user, business, and tech approaches must be set in order to build the best solution possible. In this process, many methods are applied to aim to collect as much data as possible.

Lastly, creating high and low-fidelity prototypes helps to visualize a simplified app version. This allows us to run tests and implement enhanced features closest to users' reality.

Usability

Usability is directly linked to the product process. It is a criterion throughout the making steps of an application and it is about how easy it is to use the app, in other words, how intuitive the navigation is.

Good usability assures that certain actions can be made with few clicks and objectively because the user's need must be solved. Planning the app's screens and features long and confusing paths that enable users to complete an action and make them feel frustrated are avoided.

For that matter, investing in usability brings positive results in terms of adherence to application usage and brand credibility.

God practices in software development

In terms of code good practices are fundamental to adequate application functionality. Some of them are clean code, test automation, and cloud computing.

We described before the main pillar for writing clean code. Applying clean code has benefits in software maintenance. With clear and simplified writing, error treatment can be done more efficiently.

Moreover, another good practices pillar is test automation. This tool allows more efficient delivery, avoiding bugs from new commits and assuring long-term software quality.

Finally, cloud computing resources combined with the previous good practices cited also help agile software development because a remote database is used to store the code instead of a local device.

This, applying good practices bring gains in both the short term and long term. In the case of changing the tech team having that code design helps in a better understanding of the legacy code, which optimizes the maintenance.

In this article, we talked about some essential elements in the process of creating an app, along with some main current market tendencies.

Here at Liven, we develop our client's apps based on those and much more quality pillars! Contact us to make your app.