How To Create An App for Play and App Store in 10 Easy Steps

businesses that get it right.

A great mobile app can exponentially help your businessin many ways. It can:

• Increase your revenue by improving sales or introducing a new revenue stream
• Build up engagement and community by providing a resource for your audience
• Improve employee communication by being a core internal app for your business
• Increase your brand awareness and enhancing your mobile marketing strategy

However, creating an app can be an intimidating experience. You may be discouraged by high potential costs, technical teams, complex project management, months of work, and many costly risks among the way.

If that sounds familiar, this guide is for you. By the end of it, you will be able to:

• Define and research your app
• Create and test your app’s layout and use cases
• Choose your development path based on your resources
• Build and test your app without a single dollar spent
• Launch your first app in a matter of weeks with a minimum cost

We’re breaking down every step, giving you all the resources you need, and explaining all your options.

Let’s go!

Step 1: Define Your Objectives With a Mobile App

Before you start figuring out how to create an app, you need to first define the reason why you want to create that app in the first place. Without this clarity, your planning will be convoluted, which means your end result will most likely reflect that as well

Your app should satisfy two goals:

1. Your ideal users’ goal
2. And your business goal

First, let’s look at your audience (aka potential users). Whenever they interact with your business – both online or offline, regardless of the channel – they get to ask themselves: what’s in it for me? If they don’t see a benefit almost immediately, they will simply move on, and that’s true for your app, too.

An improvement for your business can mean many things, simply depending on your current situation. Some of the most common impacts a good mobile app can create for you are increased ROI, more returning customers, better productivity, reduced expenses, improved social proof, and a boost in brand awareness.

Now that we covered the basics, it’s time to go deeper. Remember, an app can have more than one purpose, and any of them can benefit your audience, you, or both.

So start by asking yourself these questions:

• What areas of your business need improvement?
• How can a mobile app impact that problem?
• What is the potential result?

Other key areas include your market and competitor research, timeline, budget, and more, but we’ll focus on these factors later in this guide.

Now is the time to introduce you to our hypothetical business – Workout+ – to tackle these questions and all the steps that follow as we progress through them, so we can help you envision your development with BuildFire for your own mobile app.

Workout+ is a fitness and health center in San Francisco, and it has been running for 3 years now. It is attracting both new and existing clients, but because of a less than average retention rate, its growth has been stagnant for the past year.

Here, we want to tackle this business challenge and see what could a mobile app accomplish to tackle this problem – so let’s look at those questions again.

What areas of our business need improvement?

Our center has solid brand awareness and we gain new clients consistently, but we have an above-average churn rate. Some of our churned customers noted a difficulty to book their classes and personal trainers as one of the key reasons to leave, as it was only available on desktop and many of our clients are often on the go.

At the same time, we spend lots of time to run the logistics and basic communication with our clients, which consumes most of our team resources and efforts, making us inefficient and limiting our growth.

How can a mobile app impact these problems?

With a mobile app, we could automate many processes, such as classes overview, booking from mobile and important service updates, while enabling easy customer feedback and one-to-one chat.

What is the potential result?

On the customer side, we could increase overall client satisfaction and boost great social proof. And as a business benefit, we could see increased productivity and larger revenue.

Your answers to this step will be your core guidance throughout the rest of this process.

Step 2: Lay Out Your App Functionality & Features

Now that you know what you want to achieve with your app, it’s time to define your mobile app’s scope (the part where you figure out how to create an app).

This is the time to get creative and write down all the functionalities and app features necessary to accomplish the solutions and results outlined in the previous step.

Some of the features may include:

• eCommerce integrations
• Contact us
• Forms
• YouTube or Vimeo integration
• Chat
• Push notifications
• Social sharing

Write down any features that will bring value to your app, and make this your guidance throughout the full app development process.

For our Workout+ mobile app, we want to have an appointment booking feature, events calendar, RSS reader, chat, customer feedback, team members directory of our trainers, and maps for directions.

Step 3: Research Your Competitors

Now you know what you want your app to do, and it’s time to look at what your successful competitors are already doing to lead their customers to similar goals.

This is also the time to not just focus on your local competition, but also look at the companies in the same market around the country or even around the world. This will spark new ideas and point at existing gaps in the market.

Look at their features, app layout and functionalities and take notes of anything that stands out to you or anything that you feel is missing.

From our competitor research in the fitness center and gym industry, we came across an idea for a loyalty/rewards feature for our app. This is something our fitness center never offered and this was a great time to start.

We’ve also discovered that many fitness centers don’t offer an option for direct booking through the app, so this was an opportunity for Workout+ to stand out.

Step 4: Create Your Wireframes & Use Cases

So far, you’ve defined your app’s objectives and mapped out its functionalities, including your market and competitor research insights. This is the time to give your app its first skeleton and piece these individual blocks together with wireframing.

Wireframing is a visual guide that will represent your app’s layout and the flow between the screen without the distractions of visual design and graphic elements. It is the bridge between your raw thoughts and a final product before any of the technical phases begin.

Your wireframing is driven by your use case(s) – the small, specific tasks your users can achieve with your app.

This is your unique chance to:

• Understand your use cases and the thought processes behind them
• Optimize the number and order of screens to reach each goal
• Create multiple screen flows to find which one works best
• Save hundreds of development hours later on

There are two ways to create wireframes: offline and online. If you prefer offline, you can simply use a pen and blank paper, or you can use templates like the ones from SneakPeekIt.

Online options include:

• Templates for Adobe Suite
• Specialized tools like Fluid UI,Balsamiq Mockups, Gliffy and Mockflow

Choose your tool or template, and start sketching. You should have one wireframe for each use case, and it should represent the full screen flow a user will see from opening your app to achieving their goal.

You’ll eventually want to have a few documents like the below image for each of the use cases your app covers:

This will map out the flow users will take from opening your app to achieving one of the goals you’ve set out.

Step 5: Test Your Wireframes

Now that you have your use cases and their visual representation, it’s time to test your app’s flow and user experience.

Testing will help you analyze your use cases, identify any friction points and question the ease of your mobile app processes. You will compare your screen flow with your user’s expectations and prevent any frustrations.

To test your wireframes and use cases, you should use a tool like Invision to make your wireframe interactive. Using Invision, you can connect screens and link actions to simulate the actual experience of your app.

It is really quick and easy to do this: you can register for a free account on Invision and create your project by simply clicking the ‘+’ sign and selecting ‘Create new prototype’. Once you name your prototype and select its type, you’ll be given two options: syncing with Sketch/Photoshop or adding image files from your computer.

You can now add images of individual screens from your wireframe. In each of these images, you can use the options at the bottom of the screen to link screens to one another. Once you’re finished, you can share your prototype using the ‘Share’ option at the top-right corner of the screen. And that’s it!

Use this to share the project with your colleagues or your customers to test the use cases and the intuitiveness of user’s journey, from opening the app to reaching the goal.