Fabric

All about designing apps

Apps are a part of our everyday life.

There are apps for almost everything - gaming, chats, photo editing, banking, keeping fit... we even use them to check the weather!

Before those little icons appeared on your screen a lot of work went into making each app.

Let’s find out more!

What does it take to make an app?

Investing in an app requires good financial planning at every stage. Find out more about what is involved at the different stages of designing an app.

Consider what decisions need to be made at each stage and how this might affect your costs.

Research

Research is a crucial first step in app design.

It helps you learn about your competition and your potential customers.

It’s worth investing some time and money to make sure you are creating an app that people will want to use, or you might end up spending a lot of money for not much return.

Have you thought about who your audience is and what they might want?

Asking people who are potential customers is a great way to gauge your ideas.

Checking reviews

Checking reviews for existing apps could also be useful!

What would you learn from the following two examples?

Q. What could you learn from the app descriptions and customer feedback?

Q. What functions are essential for this app?

Q. How does each app make money?

Costs

It’s important to estimate the cost of production and forecast how much your app could earn. Working through all the costs at the beginning will ensure that your app will be good value for money.

Developing an app can cost anywhere between £7000 for something basic to over £100000. To make a profit, your app will need to earn more money than it cost to make.

There are several things you will need to consider when estimating how much your app will cost, for example, will it need to work on multiple platforms? Will it need to link to other websites? How will you promote and maintain your app?

There will also be several ways in which an app can earn money, for example, will you charge people to download it? Will it have upgrades? Could other people pay to advertise in your app?

Options

Q. What does your app need to do?

A weather app probably wouldn’t need a shopping basket but it might need to find where you are. Understanding what your app needs to do will help you decide what features it needs.

Design

What will your app look like?

The more features or screens your app has, the more expensive it will become.

You will need to work out the look and feel (colours, shapes, fonts, etc.), but also what elements appear on the page.

Your app might need to adapt to many screen sizes and formats depending on the device used to access it, so you will want to think about how responsive your app design is.

Development

Once you know what you want your app to do you will need to create a prototype. This will help you consider each step of how your app will be used.

Developing a blueprint to work out the user experience is a great way to minimise the risk of errors when you come to build your app.

Next comes the technical bit of coding the app. If you’re a computer wiz, you might do that yourself, or pay a developer to build it for you.

Maintenance

You’ve done a great job and created a really fun new app.

MoneySense - Making sense of money