The demand for delivering better business apps faster isn’t going away; in fact, it’s accelerating. Even companies outside of the tech or software industries are putting in the effort to create consumer-grade app experiences, complete with excellent design and visually-appealing interfaces.
To create applications that people actually want to use, forward-thinking teams are leveraging the principles of design thinking along with product management best practices. The most successful follow the five Ds of app building. Let’s go through all of them now.
1. Discovery
The first of our 5 Ds is discovery. At its core, discovery is about exploring the problem space your application will address. Unfortunately, this stage is often rushed-through or skipped altogether, as many teams think they know exactly what user problems their app is going to solve.
However, this assumption is often incorrect. That’s why team mindset is the most important part of discovery. Your job is to learn, not to know. The only way you can make the best possible product is by identifying and testing your preconceived beliefs about your users and digging deeper into their needs and wants.
Here are five quick tips for a successful discovery phase:
- Use The5 Whys to get at the real root of the problem.
- Talk directly to at least three actually (not proxy!) users.
- Consider using a third party to conduct user research.
- Conduct user interviews one-on-one to avoid social pressure.
- Use anonymized surveys to get unfiltered opinions and suggestions.
2. Definition
During the discovery phase, you probably came up with a lot of potential problems and solutions. Now it’s time to narrow down the list to the specific issue you’ll tackle with the first version of your app.
Keep this in concrete terms that are specific to the task at hand. “Make users’ lives easier” won’t cut it. Instead, think “reduce the time it takes users to compile sales reports by making the data more easily accessible and simplifying the workflow.”
This step is also when you’ll complete your product brief and set metrics for success. The product brief serves as your guiding light and a single source of truth for the product. It should define virtually everything about it, ranging from what you’re building, who’s involved, and how you’ll test it. A key component of your product brief is user stories — simply put, how people will use the app to accomplish their goals.
As you exit the definition stage, you ‘ll want to have a clear, concise picture of what you want to accomplish and how you’ll know if you did it. That’s where success metrics come in. Essentially, these are key performance indicators (KPIs) that affect the bottom line. Examples include time spent on a task, time spent learning how to complete a task, lead response time, and lead-to-opportunity ratio.
3. Design
Design isn’t just about making apps look pretty. While aesthetic matters, it’s just one element of creating an app that people actually want to use.
That’s why app builders should focus on human-centered design (HCD) specifically. HCD sits at the intersection of user desirability, business viability, and technical feasibility, and places the customer at the center of every process. This means having conversations with users and incorporating their feedback into the product.
As a refresher, the four key traits of a well-designed app are utility, efficiency, clarity, and refinement. Accessibility is another important consideration, especially for government agencies and public-sector firms. Simply put, can people of varying abilities use your app easily? Does the app work for people who use screen readers or anyone who can’t use a keyboard or mouse?
Once you’ve taken all these factors into account, consider your app as a continuation of your overall brand identity. As a result, it should follow your company’s style guide and brand elements.
4. Development
The development stage is all about iteration and testing, with the goal of getting your app to its best possible state before launch. Some teams do this through agile product development: testing your riskiest assumptions as quickly and cheaply as you can. At Skuid, we prefer lean product development, an outcomes-based methodology that aims to eliminate waste in the process, among other principles (although we do retain some aspects of agile development, like using Kanban boards and other popular agile tools).
Testing is another essential part of this stage, and ensures you’re building stable apps that users will adopt. Ideally, you want to build and run automated tests. Using an open-source project like Selenium, you can write automated test scripts that will run through actions in a browser, comparing results to the expected outcome. If you don’t have the technical expertise to write automated tests scripts, manual testing is the next best thing.
No matter which avenue you choose, be sure to include accessibility audits as part of your testing discipline. Tools like the Social Security Administration’s Accessibility Testing Tool (ANDI) and Freedom Scientific’s Job Access with Speech (JAWS) are good places to start. In addition, Skuid makes building for accessibility easier by natively supporting aria labels (Accessible Rich Internet Applications), which are used by access technologies like screen readers.
Before moving on to the final stage, you’ll need to go through user acceptance testing (UAT) — the buffer between developing the app and releasing it into production.
With UAT, you put the app in front of actual users. Though this is more about checking that you’ve built the right thing than discovering bugs, it’s perfectly normal to uncover issues here, too.
5. Deployment
You found a problem, figured out a solution, and designed and developed the application. Now it’s time to give it to your users! To ensure a smooth launch and set the stage for high adoption rates, you need a procedural way to test the app within different environments.
Enter the sandbox, an isolated computing environment with tightly controlled conditions. Well, actually, you should have three of them:
- Development sandbox: Where developers can test their ideas and build them.
- User acceptance testing (UAT) sandbox: Where you begin introducing users to the new app.
- Quality assurance (QA) sandbox: A QA team will do everything it can to break the product so that you can fix it.
With your sandboxes in place, it’s time to start testing. To do this, you’ll need to define the test case, including expected outcomes and edge-case scenarios. Capture what the app is supposed to do and build test cases to make sure it’s doing that. There are many types of testing — from unit tests to smoke tests to user acceptance testing. Regardless of how in-depth you choose to go, you should use an automated testing solution.
Try, try again
Following the 5Ds is an iterative process.First, proceed through them in a sequential manner because the output of each serves as input for the next. Then, once you’ve delivered the product, you can go through them again to keep making your application the absolute best it can be.
Want to learn more about how Skuid accelerates and improves the app development process? Request a custom demo.