Mobile App Development Plan: Concept, Audiences, Design, Wireframing

Having a great business idea isn’t sufficient, it takes a lot more to bring your ideas to execution.

This is the point where most businesses find themselves clueless. Additionally, the process can be complicated, and without the right plan, it’s easy to feel lost.

Before starting any project numerous questions hit your mind and you end up feeling perplexed. But a robust development plan and the right guidance lead your project to the path of success.

Developing any mobile app and website is similar to constructing a building that requires a solid foundation to ensure its smooth functionality and longevity. Amid all this, mobile apps have become the first choice for any business.

Building a successful app requires rigorous planning, or else you won’t get your desired results. What if there is a planning guide that helps you to get started in no time? Sounds riveting? Well, mobile application development planning is the foremost step to starting your dream business project.

Significantly, not all freelance developers are aware of the factors included in app-building project planning. Fortunately, this blog is here to clear that vague picture of the application development plan and reveal all the rigorous aspects you must consider. Let’s have a quick look and understand the role of a mobile app building plan:

Significance of Planning Mobile App Before Development Phase

Planning plays a vital role in ensuring your project’s success regardless of what industry you belong to. A well-planned mobile app development business plan can make a tremendous difference and offer advantages that uplift your business growth.

Creating an effective strategy for mobile applications requires adequate planning that takes into consideration each step of the development process. Moreover,  organizing your plan of action allows you to write a more detailed plan, establish a clear understanding of each team member’s role and responsibilities, and avoid any unforeseen problems or delays.

• Concept

The first step in any successful app development process is defining the concept of your application. Application development companies come up with questionnaires before planning. These questions will help shape your app’s core features and functionality. Following are the questions this questionnaire may include:

Questions to Consider:

1. What is the major problem your app will solve?
2. What are the key features of your app?
3. Who are your competitors, and how is your app different?

Conceptualization is one of the most important stages for creating a desired mobile app strategy. Without a well-defined concept, your app-building journey may lose direction, leading to confusion and unnecessary delays. Here are the factors that help in establishing a clear concept:

Market Research-

Conceptualization begins with market research, which is a critical step. The purpose of this step is to gather and analyze information about the target audience and competitors. To ensure that your app’s features and functionalities provide value to its users, you need to understand your target audience their needs, preferences, and behaviors.

Problem Definition-

A successful mobile app usually addresses a problem or meets a demand for its consumers. Thus, properly describing this problem or requirement is essential for the conceptualization process.

Primary Features and User Experience-

Once the problem or need is identified, you need to define the app’s main features. This includes describing the app’s primary functionalities and determining how they will interact.

• Audience

Understanding your audience and their behavior and preferences can help you simplify what your audience may expect from your app, it will help you prepare the right mobile app planning and design. After all, your app’s primary purpose is to serve the people who will use it, so knowing who they are and what they want is key to designing a product that resonates with them. Additionally, a well-defined audience helps guide decisions about the app’s features, design, and overall user experience. Try to answer the following:

Questions to Consider:

1. Who will use my app (age, location, interests)?
2. What devices/platforms does my target audience use?
3. What features will appeal most to my audience?

Ultimately, this will allow you to create the user’s persona. With this step only you can plan.

• Product Roadmap

Creating a mobile app is quite risky, so having a product roadmap can help you navigate smoothly, through the different phases. Moreover, this strategic document outlines the major goals, and stages of development, ensuring that your app encompasses your business goals. Creating a clear product roadmap is essential for several reasons.

Questions to Consider:

1. What are the major milestones of my app’s development?
2. What is the estimated timeline for each phase?
3. What resources are needed for each stage?

Why a Product Roadmap is Important:

Clarifies your goals:

Mapping out your development process eases defining what needs to be done and when.

Reduced risks:

A well-organized roadmap helps identify potential roadblocks early, so you can address them before they cause hassle and delays.

Informs decision-making:

The roadmap helps you make improved decisions about where to invest time, money, and resources.

Additionally, it helps you:

1. To keep your app development on track.
2. To align your app’s vision with the broader business objectives.
3. To help you make informed decisions at each stage of development.

A product roadmap is worth investing your time and efforts in since it aids businesses in showing their vision, prioritizing key features, and conveying the mobile application development strategy. Additionally, it adapts to product requirements and acts as a communication tool.

• Wireframing

Well, wireframing is all about creating a visual guide or blueprint for your app, it generally puts all of your mobile application’s screen in frames in accordance with the style, content, and feature you want. Later, you have to connect all the frames together as you desire. Additionally, it focuses on the layout, structure, and functionality of your app, but it doesn’t include detailed design elements like colors, images, or fonts, just the structure.

Questions to Consider:

1. What is the structure of my app (layout, navigation)?
2. How can I make the app intuitive for users?
3. What key features should be prioritized in the UI?

Why is wireframing significant?

Wireframes can be both simple sketches on paper or digital designs using wireframing tools like Figma or Sketch. The goal is to create a clear, functional layout that focuses on how the app will work for users, not on the final look and feel. These are the key benefits of having wireframing for your app:

1. Clarifies the App’s Structure
2. Prevents Mistakes Early On
3. Helps Developers and Designers
4. Saves Time and Costs

Apart from all this, you need to ensure that the design works well with the operating system (OS), you’re designing for. Android app developers need to keep in mind the trends when developing apps for the platform. The creator would never want users to have to deal with confusion or changes when their apps are being used.

• Prototype

The prototype can be considered as a test version of the app, where you get a working version of your app with a realistic feel of how it will function once fully developed. On the other hand, wireframes are like a blueprint but the prototype is a mock-up that allows users to click through and interact with it, though the app is yet to be developed fully.

Often, prototypes are built for fundraising, resource allocation, ideation, or market validation purposes where a cheap demo version of the app is needed. Additionally, there are numerous mobile app prototyping tools for great UX designs.

Questions to Consider:

1. How will users interact with my app?
2. Does the prototype reflect my vision for the app’s user experience?
3. How can I gather meaningful feedback from prototype testing?

Why Prototyping is Important:

1. Test Functionality
2. Validate Ideas
3. Identify Problems Early
4. Gather User Feedback

Creating a mobile app can be risky but you can mitigate this risk by producing a prototype version that gives easy access to the internal teams, decision-makers, target audience members, and others who belong to the project.

• Minimum Viable Product

The minimum viable product aka MVP is the simplest version of your app that is launched with all the key features. Instead of building a fully-featured app with every function you desire, MVP development focuses on delivering just the essential elements that make your app useful and functional.

Questions to Consider:

1. What are the essential features needed for the MVP?
2. How can I launch the MVP with the fewest resources?
3. How will I collect feedback from users?

MVP for startups is a great way to commence your business journey. However, it aims to get your app in the hands of users as quickly as possible so that you can gather feedback and tweak your idea as needed. Hence, it’s a strategy for launching an app with fewer features but still offering enough value to attract and engage users.

What makes MVP important?

1. Test the Core Idea
2. Save Time and Money
3. Gather Valuable Feedback
4. Test Product-Market Fit

One must be careful while launching the minimum viable. Expecting its reach to a wider audience would be unrealistic. However, MVP is created with the minimum key features to satisfy the early adopters and take valuable feedback from them. Consequently, this feedback plays a significant role in determining the features and functionality set.

• Version 2 and Future Iterations

After launching your application the users start interacting with it, this isn’t the end of the journey. Here the next step comes which is future iterations. This refers to improving and adding new features from time to time based on feedback and market demands.

Questions to Consider:

1. What features need to be added or improved after the MVP launch?
2. How will future iterations enhance the user experience?
3. What is my long-term vision for the app’s development?

After launching your Minimum Viable Product (MVP), you’ll gather insights about what works well and what needs improvement. These insights will help you plan for future updates that make the app even better.

Lastly, after the all planning phases, turn comes to the app development process. With professionals, you understand the importance of a well-planned app development process and how it delivers the solution you desire.

Final Words!

Having a great app idea, and the right planning for anything has the power to make or break your business’s success. However, before starting your full-scale app development it’s worth investing your time in brainstorming mobile app development planning. Do market research rigorously, understand your audience, create a product roadmap, and many others as mentioned above, or let Appventurez help you.

A well-researched app-building plan may help you in several ways including saving a lot of time and effort, allowing you to have accurate feedback, and analyzing product-market fit. Consequently, app-building planning helps you verify your app idea and gives you a confirmation to start your project without any hassle.

Why Do You Need Professionals?

You may have the misconception that you don’t need professionals during the planning stage but reality is far from this. Even many experienced developers are unaware of the aspects involved in the application building plan. This necessitates having the professional’s expertise.

Here our experts at Appventurez help you at every phase of planning from discussing your requirements (android, ioS, understanding your target audience, and creating wireframing, prototype, and MVP, to execution.