How not to have a poor app development experience

The road to application development can be rough and rocky. There can be cost and time overruns due to inaccurate planning, ambiguous guidelines, flawed execution, and unrealistic expectations. So, what can you do to protect your valuable assets from going in vain while outsourcing your app development project? You must understand the core concepts and scepticism encumbering the world of outsourcing to discern how not to get screwed up by the app developers.
Understanding the Project and the Process

Project management and application development are specialized endeavors that require a skillful approach, professional design, top-notch quality and a resonating user experience. Such perfection comes from expert-level developers and designers. Further, there are other supportive dimensions to outsourcing such as security and analytics, facilitating ongoing support, and ensuring a robust app development. So, to guarantee you have a user-friendly, glitch-free, cost-effective app; you must become familiar with key elements within your project as well as the development process followed by the company you are hiring. 
It will be beneficial to develop an understanding about how outsourcing works for your freelanced projects and develop an understanding of the project management practices and development process followed by the outsourced company before moving forward. You can look for cues that help you identify the credibility of the processes followed by the company. 
Additionally, you should have an understanding about the platform your app will target and the devices your app will support. You must have a precise action plan and clear objectives about your target audience as this understanding helps in providing precise, unambiguous specifications to the developers to avoid any future misunderstandings.
The best entrepreneurs and credible development agencies facilitate proper documentation for all high-level requirements once the details have been finalized. The document maps your vision regarding technical product specifications. Documenting the details help the customers understand what they will receive after the development cycle. In turn, it works as a guideline to the developers and designers in mapping perceived expectation of the client to actual implementation in code and design. This practice helps in avoiding ambiguity from both ends.
Credible outsourcing organizations create a detailed project plan enlisting any milestones, deliverables at each milestone and a plan to monitor progress. Normally, progress is monitored on a weekly or bi-weekly basis via review meetings. The deliverables after every milestone are sent to the client for verification and approval. Further development is restored after receiving client sign-off. 
Sometimes, outsourcing involves hidden development costs. Before you sign your contract, beware of discussing and enlisting all hidden costs that may outflow your valuable funds. Outsourcing agencies with a strong development process also provide a warranty period that may vary between 30 days or more depending on the project size, to facilitate support and maintenance once the app goes live. 
Discuss all these details along with a well-deployed payment schedule. Break up payments throughout the app development cycle so that you only have to pay when a certain milestone is reached. And lastly, don’t forget to do thorough background research before you put your resources and funds to hire potential developers.

Prepare for the Future

The world of technology is ever changing at enormous pace. The development model followed by the outsourcing agency you are hiring must be flexible enough to adapt to these changes. Many times specifications change during an ongoing project. Choosing a firm that can react proactively to such situations saves you from challenges later. Look for organizations that follow an agile methodology as organizations employing such methodology perceive change as an opportunity for betterment rather than a threat. Agile methodology helps designers and developers recognize and ascertain problems much earlier than the time they occur and adjust along the way. In this manner, the developers can respond quickly to the changing market trends thereby generating huge business value.

Understand the iron triangle for project management
​The Project Management Triangle is also referred as the Triple Constraint, Project Triangle, or the Iron triangle and highlights the three quality guidelines for project management: 

  • The quality of work is ascertained and constrained by the estimated budget, pre-specified deadlines, and scope of the project.
  • A project manager can flexibly trade between constraints.
  • When changes are incorporated in one constraint, necessary counter changes must be implemented in other constraints to compensate and counter-balance the previous changes. If this practice is not followed, quality will suffer.

One scenario of adjusting constraints can be if you want a project completed fast, increase your budget or cut down on the scope. Similarly, when you increase the scope of a project, budget and schedule require equivalent adjustments. You cannot cut down on the budget without adjusting the scope or schedule for the project. And if you do, the delivered project’s quality will decline.
However, trading between constraints so quickly and adaptively is not as easy in practice as it sounds in theory. Sometimes, it simply may not be feasible.
The road to successful application development may not be a linear path. Staying informed along the way is the first and foremost step to protect you from having a poor experience with an app developer. 

Avoiding 5 Common UX Design Errors

​A common sentiment we have harped on in our blogs is that today’s mobile application market, like business in general, is as competitive as ever. This competition necessitates the critical element of utilizing creativity to stand out and create a unique identity through the design of a positive user experience (UX). Often, people associate UX as simply the aesthetics of an application. Nonetheless, UX transcends beyond the surface design as it implements design founded upon thorough research and continuous experimentation to deliver an enjoyable experience for mobile application users. The following 5 common UX errors highlight items to avoid to ensure app success:  
Mistake #1: Relying on One Person or One Department for the UX Design

A mobile application’s user experience ought not to be one person or department’s sole responsibility. To create the best user experience, input must be collected from a cross-section of various departments and or roles. This broad team approach will contribute to a more polished user experience as varying experience and perspectives will be funneled and incorporated into a single laser beam focus.

Mistake #2: Failure to Evolve

UX design should not have a hard finish line. Rather, a mobile application’s UX should perpetually evolve as a result of the continual experience of understanding your own mobile application, changes in the market, and by taking the time to listen and understand what current and prospective users enjoy and dislike. You may wish to have a beta version of the product tested by your core users.  

Mistake #3: Designing For Your Own Likes

Often, during development, teams develop and design applications strongly in line with their own preferences. The preferred method of UX design is to distance your own preferences and biases from genuine user preferences. It is critical for your mobile application to resonate with users and as such, you must design with user’s must-haves and nice-to-haves at the forefront of your mind. Having a user-centric mentality with all aspects of mobile application development will drive you to think about your clients and propel you to make decisions rooted in research rather than assumptions.

Mistake #4: Having a Complicated UI Design

When creating the UI, apply the KISS (Keep it Simple Silly) approach. UI has to be appropriate for the nature of the application but in general, having an unnecessarily complicated UI design will take away rather than contribute to the overall UX. This stems from the inevitable distractions and the inability for the user to locate what they are searching for. Such inability to easily and quickly access information and or complete the user’s task will inevitably cause annoyance and abandonment of the mobile application.

Mistake #5: Overwhelming Users with Excess of Valueless Features

​Similar to the previous point, less is more in terms of a mobile application’s features. Too many features may take away focus from the vital features of the mobile application. Moreover, if the cursory features are poorly developed, it has a negative effect on the main elements of the application itself and taint the perceptions of users. It is a better return on investment to build up the core strengths of the mobile application rather than provide an additional feature that is less meaningful and has less impact on the overall UX. The buffet approach of trying to cater to every user’s preferences may attract additional users but will more than often frustrate your application’s core, loyal users. Mobile applications and companies in general, create the foundation of trust by delivering their products and services to their core users and costumers in a manner that is consistent in its focus.
 

Why react native is the future of mobile app development?

Provided that a current focus within the realm of information technology is that of mobile application development, the great magnitude of attention has brought with it competition and in turn, demand from the market requiring developers to develop products that are:

  • easy to use
  • perform better
  • have a quick develop time, and
  • cost effective

To help achieve such objectives, a hybrid mobile application called Reactive Native has been developed by Facebook to combine the above considerations to take mobile application technology to an enhanced level. Below are some of the features that make Reactive Nature enticing to developers and or their clients:

Strong community and ecosystem

​Being a product of Facebook, Reactive Native has already established a vast network of individuals interacting in forums that are aimed at idea and information sharing. These individuals are comprised of not only many of Reactive Native’s developers who are willing to share their expertise and knowledge openly and freely to the public, but members of the general public who are enthusiasts and eager to share their vast knowledge and resources which have already lead to many improvements to Reactive Nature.  

Cost reduction and code reuse

The primary reason that Reactive Native was developed was to reduce the challenges of those that were writing user interface for the internet, iOS, and Android. An estimated total of approximately 90% of the code in Reactive Native can be reused between Android and iOS. Moreover, Facebook made Reactive Native open source, which allows it to be compatible with platforms such as Windows and tvOS. Both the ability to reuse code and the open source element helps to reduce application development time, which not only makes application development less expensive but it also saves time or allows time for modifications to be made along the way.

Effective developer experience

Native app development may most of the time prove to be a tedious endeavor since it is characterized by inefficiency, inadequate time for deployment and less productivity from the developer. This is not the case with Reactive Native which adds the aspect of speed to web application development. Reactive Native’s ReactJS UI library for web application provides room for the efficient functioning of applications, simplified programming methods for hybrid mobile development and DOM abstraction. These aspects help to improve the application development timeline and enhance overall efficiency. For instance, Reactive Nature builds in efficiency because it allows for changes to be observed by simply refreshing the browser. Most alternative mobile application methods do not allow for this instantaneous feedback because the developer is required to deploy code-cycle in order to implement any change.

Can be combined with native code

Initially, Reactive Native was primarily developed to support only iOS. Nonetheless, enhancements to Reactive Native created compatibility with other operating systems. This again saves developers time, in turn saving clients’ money, since it allows Reactive Native to combine with other native codes without having to use any other frameworks.

Conclusion

​In light of the high demand for mobile application development, there was and there still is a need to simplify the mobile application development process. Reactive Native has progressed mobile application development towards achieving such an objective.