What keeps mobile users hooked to their phones today? It is usually the mobile application they are using since every successful mobile app is created with the perspective and needs of its users in mind. With this thought, businesses wish to have mobile applications through which they can offer the best products and services to their consumers; they want an app that can invigorate business growth and revenue. But what are the characteristics of a well-designed app? To answer this question, Confianz has consolidated a list of mobile app features to empower your business to reach your target audience.
Key Features of a Successful Mobile App
The best mobile app features for your business are as follows:
User-friendly UI
With the emergence of new mobile applications every day, it is no secret that smartphone users love to browse eye-catching applications before they make their purchasing decision. This is why a well-developed UI is the primary need of every consumer who is using your app.
Let’s quickly understand what a user-friendly UI is all about:
- Your app must be easy to use, have a well-designed UI that communicates well with your consumers, and has the potential to convert them into loyal customers.
- It must be intuitive to predict user actions e.g. when a user opens your application, they must be able to understand what the application offers, and get the answers for what they are looking for easily without spending a lot of time. This step helps in enhancing user experience and engagement.
- It must be able to fit into different screens, resolutions, and sizes depending upon the device that the user is on like tablets, phones, watches, etc.
- A consistent design pattern is always visually appealing and inviting for customers. It requires an organized structure of buttons, icons, text, etc. This helps your brand to blend well with the information given on your application. Thus, customers can understand your brand, its vision, and its offerings. This leverages brand image and visibility.
Intuitive UX
Confianz understands the value of an intuitive mobile app design from your customers’ perspective. We have illustrated the reasons why you need an intuitive design feature for your application:
- An easy-to-use application is always appreciated by users. It ensures that the app processes are seamless and effortless to perform.
- It can improve lead generation as users love to browse applications that are simple and convenient to use.
- It enhances user engagement and makes your app more desirable.
- It is capable of generating more revenue for your business.
Scalable Text
As a part of necessary accessibility features, scalable text is a must-have feature for any application.
The benefits of having scalable text are given below:
- There is no loss of resolution when zooming the device screen while using the app. Text remains clear and adapts to any screen size and resolution.
- Using desktop mode for viewing websites on a mobile device becomes achievable as there is no text distortion when the user zooms on certain parts of the screen.
- Some of your target audience might need to view the application in a large font mode. This is easily feasible with the use of scalable text.
High-Resolution Images
High-resolution images are a must-have feature of a successful app as they give a visual representation of the app in the best light irrespective of the surroundings. They are useful to relate with the content present on the app for its users. This increases the ability to provide an enhanced user experience.
Performance
Every app user loves how quickly a mobile application solves a problem they are facing. This is also one of the key requirements when they consistently use the application. Therefore your application shouldn’t crash and must load quickly.
From your customers’ perspective, these are the characteristics of your high-performing application:
- Your app must be stable, reliable, and fast.
- It must be able to notify users about system updates, estimate the time taken for these updates, and fix any errors or glitches quickly if they occur.
The key aspects to consider when developing a mobile app are as follows:
- An updated Operating System (OS) is important for optimizing the speed and performance of the application. It implies that the application must use a new framework rather than an old one.
- Uncongested Server: An overloaded server can cause the application to respond slowly or become unavailable to your users, leading to situations where the user might uninstall the app. We suggest you have a support team like Confianz to handle such issues.
- Code Optimization: The developers who handled your mobile app development must optimize the code of your application from time to time to remain fast and responsive.
- In addition, having a support team like Confianz can also advise your company about network latency (delay due to a user’s internet connection issue) and browser cache issues as well.
- In a secured client-server connection, there should be minimal handshakes so that the app doesn’t slow down.
Size of the Application
Imagine an app that occupies a significant amount of mobile storage space. This can cause inconvenience to a user who may want other important apps installed. They may uninstall the application that occupies major storage of the phone. It is vital to create apps that are small in size and relevant to your users’ needs.
Search Bar
Having a search text box within your app can help users get relevant answers to their queries quickly rather than browsing for them. This is one of the key features that make a user-friendly mobile app.
An advanced search feature is useful for your app users in the following ways:
- It allows users to search for their answers quickly and saves them time.
- By finding answers quickly, the users engage well with the application. Thus, it encourages turning leads into customers.
- App navigation becomes much more easy even for new users.
Dashboard
A dashboard for your mobile application can help your users to get an overview of what the application is about. It can also help your business to analyze customers’ behaviors and trends. It can also help mobile app users in several ways:
- It helps them to navigate the application for what they are searching for.
- It helps them to engage with the application easily and decide which features of the app would they need quick access to.
Personalization
Your business can hook customers to your application by offering more personalized experiences. This is possible by analyzing their buying behavior and preferences. It is performed through the data collected for a particular location, demographics, customers’ needs, choices, etc. This can help your business in the following ways:
- Greater customer engagement, retention, loyalty, and satisfaction.
- Marketing business offerings, boosting sales, and generating revenue.
- Increasing brand image and visibility.
Tailored experiences would entice your users to interact with your application more often. Customers are more likely to recommend such applications to their friends, colleagues, and family.
Push Notifications
Push notifications are messages sent through an application to notify your target audience about offers, reminders, events, etc.
Confianz has illustrated below the all types of push notifications suitable for your prospective buyers and customers:
- Reminders/ Alerts: Reminders help users to remember any important event or opportunity that they should not miss. Hence, relevant reminder notifications corresponding to the event can be sent before the expected date and time of the event.
- Location-based Notifications: These types of notifications are specific to a particular location to notify users about the services it offers.
- Promotional Notifications to Offer Products and Services: These notifications start with a friendly note to engage well with users. In addition, it empowers and invigorates sales by offering products or services through offers, trends, value for your target audience, etc.
- Service Notifications: These alert users about application problems, changes, and updates.
- Personal notifications: These notifications are created for a specific user based on personal details (like birthdays, and anniversaries) or the basis of previous buying trends.
- Targeted notifications: Targeted notifications are for a specific set of users based on their choices, preferences, devices, etc.
- Trigger or Transactional Notifications: These notifications are sent based on the actions performed by a user like reminders to complete a payment.
- Survey/Feedback Notifications: These kinds of notifications are great to get feedback from the users about the application. These can prove beneficial in understanding users’ pain points, and help your business understand and make necessary changes to the application.
Thus push notifications can retain and engage customers. But they can be overwhelming for your customers if they are irrelevant to them and timed incorrectly. Therefore, it is essential that your app must be able to correctly assess customer behavior before sending push notifications on their devices.
According to Confianz, an ideal Push notification should have a heading, a short description of the offering, and a link to direct the customer to your application. We recommend the following strategy for sending push notifications as it is important to retain customers and boost business growth.
- Always send notifications only to the consumers who give their acceptance of receiving notifications.
- Promote only your business and its offerings in which customers have shown interest.
- Understand your customer’s pattern of checking your application and try to send notifications accordingly.
Thus push notifications can work well for your company if they are crisp, clear, relevant, personalized, timed properly, and add value to a customer.
Battery Saving Feature
Battery saving is a critical feature that can help your customers in various ways:
- It can help your customers’ devices by putting the application to sleep when not in use and reducing battery consumption.
- If the battery of a user’s mobile phone is low, it can also disable the use of services like GPS or camera, which are heavy in battery usage, even though the application is still being used.
Automatic Speech Recognition
Your business can cater to billions of smartphone users when your app offers different types of vital yet convenient features. One of them is Automatic Speech Recognition.
- This feature provides accessibility to people with disabilities as well. It converts text into speech and helps in sending a message, browsing, and searching for information.
- It is a biometric authentication feature that can help in unlocking and performing operations in the application only by recognizing the authorized user’s unique voice and speech.
Although it is a safety feature for applications, it can be vulnerable to hacks too. This is why it is imperative to update the antivirus system and operating system (OS), like Android or iOS, from time to time.
Augmented Reality
Augmented Reality is one of the finest new features to enhance your customer experience. With augmented reality, the application uses the mobile camera to identify the user’s surroundings and generate results accordingly.
Some of the key benefits of augmented reality (AR) are as follows:
- Augmented reality provides its users with a real-time experience and excites them to use the application.
- It allows an app to gain more knowledge about the user environment and setup.
- The phone camera is the most powerful tool in the device they are using, and AR relies completely on it.
- Since AR makes the user point at things they are most interested in, it is one of the best ways to understand their likes and dislikes.
Feedback Option
Your application users can enlighten you with information like its performance, report issues, and errors. They can also help you with information about what they loved most in the app. In addition, providing customer care support options can help them connect with your company and talk about their challenges with the application. Having a feedback option can help you in several ways:
- By acknowledging your customers’ opinions, your company will be able to assess and understand their pain points and update the app accordingly.
- By responding and taking action to meet their requirements, users will gain trust in your business.
AI Chatbot
Chatbots are becoming increasingly popular in mobile applications due to their ability to give fast and relevant responses to their leads and customers. They help businesses with chat support options to furnish answers to their user queries immediately. A chatbot can help you in the following ways:
- It is a cost-saving option for your business, eliminating the need to add a workforce for chat support.
- It is a feature in the app that solves user queries quickly. It can provide relevant links and redirect requests to concerned departments in the company instantly.
- Users can write their queries and feedback regarding application offerings, functions, performance, etc. through Chatbots. This can help your company improve and enhance the application and overall business.
- Chatbots provide a seamless user experience to ensure customer satisfaction.
- Chatbots have the potential to convert prospective buyers into customers and also aid in customer retention with efficient steps. Chatbots can boost business revenue and productivity.
Integrated Application
Confianz believes that integrating your application with other useful and authentic third-party applications (e.g. payment applications, social media platforms, etc.), can help in achieving long-term results for your business.
The benefits of having an integrated application are as follows:
- It helps in promoting your business and its offerings.
- It helps in aligning your business operations.
- It reduces data redundancy.
- It is capable of providing insights into your prospects or existing customers’ buying behavior.
Payment Gateway Integration
One of the key features of every business app is a stable and secure payment gateway. This is because an efficient payment gateway integration makes a huge difference in increasing business output quickly and keeping its customers happy. Thus, the benefits of integrating commonly used payment gateways are as follows:
- Having a commonly used payment gateway increases customers’ trust and draws more business.
- Transactions made via the mobile app will be more secure and stable.
- Lesser failed payment transactions will result in quick turnaround times for business.
Social Media Integration
We are now living in a world driven by social media. Social media sharing is the easiest way to convey thoughts, reviews, and feedback and promote offerings that the public likes. This is why any mobile app needs to instantly interconnect with social media to gain popularity.
The key benefits of social media integration are as follows:
- Reaching your target audience is easier through your app followers. This is because users love to share and communicate with their social media connections (friends, family, etc.) about business offerings.
- Your content can reach multiple social media pages in a few clicks.
- Your business followers can convert into customers; thus generating sales and revenue.
- You can inform your followers about upcoming events, and promote products and services through social media integrated into your application.
- Analyze visitors, followers, and responses of social media users to know their opinions and preferences. This helps you to align consumer needs with your business.
Multi-device Synchronization
Having multi-device synchronization helps your application look and feel consistent across different devices. It is a feature to sync and store all the valuable information that you select from your device. When you install the same application on your new device, it has all the information that you had stored earlier. By retrieving it on the new device, you can fetch all your data in the same format as earlier.
We have illustrated below a few advantages of having this feature in your application:
- Switching devices is easier using this feature in the application.
- It is portable to different devices like Mac, iPhone, Apple Watch, etc.
But if you would like to have it as a cross-platform application also, we have your back. Confianz can create multi-device synchronization features that support different devices with different Operating Systems like Windows, Android, and iOS.
Data Caching
Data Caching is a mechanism where we use the phone’s memory to store the app’s data and allow users to access a certain set of features offline. The application requires permission from the user to device storage and can maintain page information for easy loading. The key benefits of data caching are as follows:
- Data caching enables the application to be available even when the user has no connection to the internet, resulting in more user interactions where other apps are not able to connect.
- The application works faster when the page is stored in a local device, which means the user is happier with lesser data transfer happening over the internet.
Location-Based Management
A location-based management feature enables your business to suggest services to your customers based on the area where the request has originated from. Thus, it can help your business in several ways:
- Deliver products and services at the exact location of the customer.
- Understand customer behavior to cater to their requirements.
- Boost business growth and revenue.
Data Collection Opt-out
Since users’ personal information is of utmost importance, it is vital to include a data collection opt-out feature in the application.
The advantages of this feature are as follows:
- It helps in gaining the trust of your app users.
- It ensures data security and user privacy.
Secured Application
Security features are fundamental when you develop an app to build trust in your users to install, browse, post information, or buy products or services from it. To have a secured application, an end-to-end encryption process is required to safeguard information like the name, age, address, and payment information of your customers and gain their loyalty in the long term.
Following are the privacy and security considerations that matter to Confianz for developing a safe application:
- Secured platform: Mobile app development must be done on a secured platform. Using the proper IDE (Integrated Development Environment) can enable developers and testers to write code, perform tests and debug operations on a single platform. This avoids the need to switch to different platforms or tools and maintains the integrity and confidentiality of the code.
- Encrypting the source code: Developers must encrypt their source code by using specific tools to avoid it from becoming vulnerable to attackers. Using a good anti-virus can also enable their systems to be secured and ward off any risks of cyber attacks.
- Patching operation: A patch means a software update made to fix a particular program code. Performing patching operations can also fix the vulnerabilities of the application.
- Code hardening and code signing: Code hardening and code signing are vital practices for securing mobile applications. Code hardening is a programming practice to ensure the utmost security of the application and avoid various hacking techniques. It is performed by following certain coding standards during the application development phase. In addition, code signing is a process of adding a digital signature to the operating system (OS) of the device to confirm application authenticity.
- Authorizing APIs before communication: Whenever your application communicates internally for different operations, it must be authorized to create secure e-commerce operations.
Without having general data protection in place, your application can be vulnerable to hackers causing financial losses, losing sensitive data, causing a bad reputation for your business, and eventually losing customers. This is why it is important to develop a secure application.
Biometric Identification
Biometric identification is an app security feature to log into an application. It can help users securely save their data into the app without any breaches or hacks. Moreover, consumers trust applications that provide legitimate access through fingerprint recognition, and face recognition.
The advantages of including a biometric authentication process in your application are as follows:
- The secured and reliable verification process for your app users.
- Developing trust, reliability, and transparency in your customers to do business; thus increasing customer engagement, revenue, and customer retention.
- Easier access to applications as compared to using a username and password.
Although the application becomes more secure with biometric protection, there is still a need to ensure that the biometric credentials are encrypted to prevent misuse. This can be achieved through multi-factor authentication, and storing on the cloud.
Complying with App Store Guidelines
To develop trust in your users to install and use your application, it must comply with the app store guidelines. App store guidelines are critical for your application, as they are created to ensure the privacy of users and their data.
Our team at Confianz understands the app store standards to create and launch a reliable, secure, and user-friendly mobile application. We also update our team with fresh guidelines to launch secured applications for our customers.
The Confianz Viewpoint on Mobile Applications
As we meet and connect with businesses every day, our experience has shown that businesses show greater interest in having applications rather than websites. They agree that handheld devices would offer greater flexibility to their users than laptops and desktops. Thus, accessing apps is more convenient for their customers to engage and make purchases too. This is why we highly recommend you have an application to run your business smoothly.
To know more about how we create applications to meet business challenges, connect with us at [email protected]. We know there are many steps involved in developing an app, and we’re committed to helping you get through them all. Our team can help you with every step of development. Build app for your business with Top Mobile Application Development Company in Charlotte, USA. We build Custom Android, iOS and cross-platform applications for mobile devices.
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