At AppFutures we appreciate the importance of providing solutions that are delivered on time, on spec, and on budget. We therefore use a robust development methodology that has been successfully tried and tested over a number of years.
We also quote for work upfront and that price never changes; you can feel confident that your mobile app will be delivered to specification for the agreed budget and not a penny more.
Although we have many steps to our project process the following stages are key to how we work in app development:
Understanding
Sometimes described as ‘requirements gathering’ or ‘needs analysis’ we like to keep this simple. We listen, ask questions, share our thoughts, then repeat until we have real understanding of not only what the app development process has to produce, but why it has to be produced. What is the real world ROI that our clients expect?
Identifying how users interact with the app can be achieved through various techniques, but use case diagrams are often the most insightful and easiest for all parties to work together with.
Design
Design not only considers how a mobile app looks, but how the user will interact with it – therefore usability and accessibility are important factors at this stage.
Before our graphic designers begin adding styling, images or colours to the app, we will first create greybox models that highlight the proposed structure of all essential elements. Next we move on to creating visual mock-ups that replicate how the finished app will look and these normally include aspects such as the styling of fonts and input fields, the addition of required images and the general polish that makes a functional app attractive to the end user.
Development
Our agile approach to mobile app development allows us to present our clients with working prototypes at an early stage in the process. We are then in a position to review feedback and implement changes if necessary during build process instead of at the end. This helps shorten the time to market of the app and helps us to keeps our budget quotes down.
Although testing is an ongoing activity for the team at AppFutures we go through a period of dedicated testing on completion of the development cycle where we ensure that the mobile app not only works as it should from a functional perspective, but that it is user friendly and meets our accessibility requirements.
Deployment
On completion of the above steps in our development process we are then in a position to launch the app. At this stage we will carry out any necessary training with the clients to ensure that they are comfortable with managing their new product and we answer any outstanding questions that they may have.
We then look to configure the app on the appropriate delivery platforms which could include third party app stores, client websites or even on our own servers.
