You and Yours: Identifying a Customer’s Needs and Wants
The mobile device space is relatively new, less than 5 years old. PopAppFactory was created when this space appeared, and we are still going strong while others have failed. In this time we have created may apps for customers and gained invaluable experience in all phases of mobile apps development.
The mobile space has its own unique life-forms, different from other forms of computing. It has rhythms and processes which we are very familiar with, and which we can help you understand because we create apps for multiple devices. While these devices have different dialects (Apple vs the many variants of Android, for example), they exist in the same sphere. We can help understand this sphere, and to position your app in the most advantageous way.
What your Customer does with your app: Interface and Design
What your customer does with your app depends on what it was designed to do: not only regarding its ultimate purpose, such as games or on-line role playing, but also in how the app presents itself as the customer is using it.
Your customer is often on the go, so the User Interface (UI) must be as simple as possible, making the app easy to learn and use. There is no standard, or «boiler-plate» UI for apps, and each app must be looked at uniquely in its design and aesthetic, and the «flow» of the app must be analyzed and mapped to optimize the customer’s interaction with it. This is done by our designers through wire-framing and modeling.
Staying the Course with Agile Development
PopAppFactory uses the agile development methodology to create and maintain apps. We are solidly grounded in it.
The agile development methodology promotes and facilitates quick software development. It uses a team-oriented approach with early and persistent testing measured against design specifications and goals. This iterative build-test-measure process provides quick feedback on whether the app is meeting its specifications and goals. In this way the development process is forced to focus on the goals, yet also freed to be flexible because the process itself is not locked into a given procedure other than the goals. You build, you test. Does it work? Good, proceed. No? Go back and fix it.
Many developers and even teams write only one program, and then modify it to meet differing needs. The agile development process, being team- and goal-oriented, focuses development on the successful completion of your app, and builds the app to meet that objective.
Learning and re-learning: Build-Test-Measure
Agile Development uses a Build-Test-Measure process to quickly develop apps that meet or exceed goals and expectations. But what happens when app has been released «into the wild» and problems develop, or if its actual behavior in real life doesn’t meet expectation?
Development teams have people or groups who try to break apps. This is «Quality Assurance,» and all development groups, including PopAppFactory, have them. During development, and before releasing an app, PopAppFactory gathers metrics on the app’s behaviors. Working in-house, before release, Quality Assurance tries to break the app. This includes testing it on the devices it was intended for, and measures such areas as latency, and giving feedback to the development team. The metrics gathered, the profile of its behavior, are analyzed to see where improvement in performance could be gained, or bottlenecks eliminated. These metrics, combined with our experience, tell us whether it is appropriate to proceed or if we should go back and improve its performance.
Once the app is released and customer feedback starts coming in, the app’s profile can be referred to if problems or areas for improvement are identified.