How to Make Your Mobile App Successful: 8 Tips 

By Olha Onofriichuk

Creating a successful app is an exciting but challenging task. If you’re looking for guidance to steer you in the right direction, you’ve landed in the perfect spot. This article contains tips and steps that can edge you closer to this goal, as they are based on the experience of my team, who are experts in the realm of web and mobile app development.  

To get started, consider these three crucial factors. By emphasizing them from the very beginning, you can easily define your next steps and ensure you’re heading in the right direction.

Points you can’t miss to make your app successful 

In a nutshell, these are the following points:

1. Unique value proposition 

If you want your app to be successful and gather reviews like “Wow, I’ve never seen this before!” or “This is the only app that gave me exactly what I was looking for!”, think about your unique value proposition. 

Tip: Schedule a brainstorming session with your team, look at what your competitors offer, and give clear answers to questions like why users should choose your app if there are thousands of similar apps and what you can offer that others can’t.

2. UX and UI are important

Make your app visually appealing and easy to use. Ensure the screens are intuitive and users understand where to click and what to do further. Otherwise, users will just leave the app because they can’t determine their next steps. Consequently, you must make users understand which functionality this app has and which pains it can relieve. 

Tip: Offer comprehensive onboarding videos with tutorials to make the first touch with the app smooth and pleasant, ensuring a positive attitude towards your app.

3. Performance

Think about your feelings and emotions when you open the app, but nothing occurs and the initial screen remains stuck in constant loading mode. Have you ever experienced anything like this? If yes, then you understand this feeling of frustration because the app was working slowly, and you had to wait for ages.

Tip: To avoid such situations, pay enough attention to ensure good app performance (and no bugs, please). Besides this huge disadvantage of poor performance, how your app works directly affects such mobile app KPIs as user growth rate, retention rate, churn rate, daily and monthly active users, etc.

This was just a general overview of which points you need to bear in mind when thinking about the ways to make your app successful. Now, it’s time to delve into more detailed steps.

5 more tips and tricks for a successful mobile app

Let’s explore a few additional tips that can come in handy when you are on your way to creating an app and bringing it to success.

1. Create a design system

Find your style, your design, and elements that will be used throughout the app. Besides making your app visually appealing and attractive, it brings one more benefit. When users remember that these elements are from your app, they start associating your app with these elements, which leads to raising brand awareness. And in the world of competition, it’s definitely a must.

A few more tips regarding design…

Such principles as design consistency and hierarchy are fundamental principles in mobile app design. They directly impact the user experience, usability, branding, development efficiency, and the long-term success of your app. 

Design hierarchy helps guide users’ attention to the most essential elements on a screen. Through visual cues like size, color, typography, and placement, designers can emphasize essential actions or information, ensuring users know where to focus their attention.

And talking about design consistency, a consistent and well-organized design instills trust in users. When an app looks polished and reliable, users are more likely to trust it with their personal information or for critical tasks.

2. Expectations vs. Reality

A critical mistake that must be avoided is failing to provide users with what they expect to see when using your app. Do you remember memes about “Expectations vs. reality”? This is exactly the case. Especially if you run an advertising campaign, showing what a fantastic app this is and promising users that they will have particular features. 

Just make sure you really offer what is promised. Then, you’ll meet users’ expectations and avoid this “expectations vs. reality” effect. 

4. Marketing makes sense

Following the previous point, what can help significantly is marketing. After all, unless people are aware of your app, they won’t be able to use it. Therefore, it’s crucial to showcase your app to your target audience and make them aware of its existence. But wait, don’t put everything aside trying to launch an ad campaign ASAP. Conduct research, learn your competitors and what they offer, take some preparatory steps, and only after that start running ads. It should be an informed decision that will lead to success, not draining your budget. 

5. Develop a high-quality product

Maybe this paint should be in the first place, but still… it’s a base, a foundation that defines the future. If your goal is to build a successful app with a long-lasting future, then the first thing you need to think about from the very beginning is creating a high-quality product that will function well and have no bugs, as well as won’t need fixing some troubles all the time. 

In case you have already started to google “How to develop a great app?”, here is a slight hint. To develop a high quality high-performance mobile app, focus on your team. It can be an in-house team, or you can work with an IT outsourcing company or even freelance developers. 

Summary

This article outlines nine tips that can help your app succeed. Summarizing, focus on user-centric design and intuitive UI/UX, conduct market research, define clear value proposition, and ensure smooth app performance, and high quality of the app in general.

By following these guidelines, you can increase your app’s chances of success in a competitive mobile app landscape.

About the Author

Olha Onofriichuk is a Marketing Specialist at Software Development Company itjet, passionate about growing businesses, and sharing marketing tricks and useful tips on itjet blog.