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App Development

What are the stages of working on a mobile application

Mobile app development costs can be roughly divided into five categories:

1. Management (20% of the total time).

2. Design (11%).

3. Development (55%).

4. Testing (11%).

5. Analytics (3%).

The most expensive graphs at the development stage will be:

  • A large amount of data, screens and actions in the application;
  • Backend and API; Administrative panel;
  • Integration of third-party services; Users with different roles;
  • Use of hardware components and integration with third-party devices;
  • AR and facial capture.

The number of supported operating systems also affects the final cost of the product. This is especially true for Android: if you are making an application for the widest possible audience, then they should be pledged to support versions from 4.4 and below – these are still used by residents of Africa and India.

Mobile app marketing is a constant expense. The budget is needed to attract the primary audience, retain regular customers and search for new ones, to create a more attractive image against the backdrop of competitors. It is better to approve the size of the budget for the year ahead.

The same applies to the budget for updating and maintaining your product.

What are the stages of working on a mobile application

First contact with the development studio.

To develop a mobile application, business most often uses the services of mobile development studios. To make the studio take you seriously right away, work above the application. Send it from the corporate mailbox, remembering to fill in the “Subject” field. Tell us about the goals of the application, audience, plans for marketing and development. Attach to the letter everything that you already have and can help the team in evaluating the project: an outline of the terms of reference, corporate identity, prototype, design. Name the amount you are willing to spend on the project.

With an application like “I want an app like Uber. What is the price?” no one will work.

This information will go to the manager of the development studio. You will have a telephone conversation with him, during which you will be asked clarifying questions, the answers to which will complement the application.

The application is sent to the account manager, with whom you dive deeper into the project.

After a series of meetings, the account manager gives the approximate timeline and budget, and also warns that after the prototyping stage, developers can discover previously unobvious difficulties, and the timing will change. If you are interested in cooperation, a preliminary technical task and estimate will be prepared for you, included in the commercial offer and sent to you.

Development will begin when the parties exchange signed agreements.

Design.

Designers, business analysts and system analysts are involved in the work. Their task is to find out why the product is needed, who needs it, how users will work with it and solve problems. and how it will bring you money. A portrait of the target audience will help answer these questions, which can be compiled through surveys, research and interviews with potential users and you. Once you have a user profile, you will begin to hypothesize about how they will work with the application and achieve their goals.

At this stage, you should find out if the problem your application is designed to solve is real, and if there will be it has users. Get ready to invest a lot of personal time and effort now, so as not to throw millions of rubles into the air later.

Prototyping.

A prototype is a sketch of a product that gives an idea of ​​its appearance, work logic and main functionality.

Work on it begins with a rough layout of the application screens, which can be drawn on paper or on a computer. Then the layout acquires specifics: interface elements fall into place on the screens, and this already resembles something. Further, the screens are connected by conditional lines and turn into a User Flow, or a map of screens. With it, it will become clear how the user will navigate through the application, which steps in this movement are superfluous, which functions are not needed, and which ones are missing.

If you wish, the designers can create a clickable version of the prototype. It will be possible to open it on the phone, click on some of the buttons and reach the goals of the application by evaluating the User Flow.

Business analytics. An important role at the stages of design and prototyping is played by a business analyst (aka product analyst). His main task is to understand how the process of work on the project proceeds and convey its meaning to the client and the team: what will the result of work at the business level be, why will it give it, and what product hypotheses support it.

Business analytics is done either on very large projects or in start-ups that, based on analytics, can change business goals or change entirely.

The pool of work of a business analyst can be very extensive:

  • Analysis of the target audience, identification and description of target segments;
  • Formation of product hypotheses and business hypotheses;
  • Formation of the product model (Minimum Valuable Product, Minimum Awesome Product, full-fledged product), product core, main and secondary functionality;
  • Conducting a business review: the result of the work is checked to see if it corresponds to the previously set business purposes;
  • Specification and description of the requirements for the implementation of the product and individual features;
  • Processing requirements, turning them into terms of reference (TOR);
  • Formation of growth hypotheses for the product;
  • Retrieving metrics and setting up analytics;
  • Analysis and statistics, formation of needs for changes in the product.

All items, depending on the needs of the project, are potential documents. Since the requirements for the product may change on the project, during the development process, the business analyst is with the team

and update the documentation.

System analytics.

The system analyst gathers business process requirements. His tasks:

  • Understand and clearly articulate what the actual result the client needs: a mobile application for one or two platforms, an administrative panel, a server part (or a backend), sections with certain capabilities, etc. The result of this formulation will be a functional task (FZ). If it does not exist, then the development process starts to hurt: then there will be Wishlist, which do not fit with the agreements, then the developers will no longer understand what needs to be done;
  • Design a common system architecture: what services will be, what they will be responsible for, whether there are integrations with other systems and how they interact with each other with friend. This work is embodied in diagrams, texts, documentation for the API (Application Programming Interface, or application programming interface – a description of the ways in which one program can interact on the other), documents that describe data flows from system to system or user actions. Business processes and technical scenarios are brought into one-to-one correspondence with each other.

The system analyst is the focal point of all knowledge about the project, he can talk about any aspect of the system and stays on the project until it is completed.

It is possible that the analyst has made understandable documents and is no longer involved in the project, because it is proceeding in accordance with the documents.