If you are planning to build a mobile app from scratch, you must know what the respective app will do. But having an app idea is just the tip of the iceberg when you consider the stupendous task of executing the idea into a successful app. But an app features idea with powerful execution involves a complicated and time-consuming procedure. This is why creating a detailed Product Requirements Document (PRD) for the app project is extremely important.
On top of everything, the principal objective of defining an app project is to make a detailed document expressly stating the purpose of the app, its features, and functions in detail. This document will work as a continuous guide for the app development project and the selection of features.
These preliminary steps and measures apart, when you build a mobile app from scratch choosing the right app features is a rigorous process involving several crucial steps. Let us provide here some of the essential steps to choosing the features for your app project.
Meticulous Research
Since all app projects, regardless of the niche or category, always strive to build powerful app products, carrying out extensive research happens to be an uncompromising requirement. Some key research areas include app users, technology stack, competitors, trends, etc.
What are the key problems the app project is going to solve? How is the app product going to address key concerns of the users? These are some of the crucial areas your product research should consider. Such extensive research will help you choose and prioritize app features and guide you to position your app against market competition.
Define the App Objective
The second most important thing is to understand and state the purpose of the app product explicitly. You must mention the primary problem it will solve; from this, you can easily get an idea of the elementary app feature. All the other features will be secondary to this.
Since the elementary app feature aims to solve a key app problem, this is something you need to prioritize. The key feature is directly associated with the core value proposition of the app for which users are primarily downloading the app. Now, does the feature solve user problems satisfactorily, or does it reduce the user pain points? This is the crucial consideration for selecting app features.
Get Rid of the Choice Dilemma
When you get engaged with prioritizing app features, it is always advisable to categorize them to avoid choice dilemmas. One of the most commonly cited ways to stay away from this dilemma is to take the help of feature themes. Groups of features with a coherent goal and app objective can belong to a theme.
Some app features will easily align with a goal, the vision behind the app, and the underlying business strategy. These coherently synced features within a theme can help you visualize the app, and you can take a better call on what to choose and what not to.
Some of the key ways app projects can adhere to feature-based themes include the following.
- Creating Feature Themes Based On App Roadmap: The principal objective of the app or what it is all about can be the very basis of these types of feature-based themes. You can break the features into categories such as “Communication”, “Integration”, “Workflow,” and several others. This practice will show you the app’s different parts and underlying features.
- Grouping Features by Their Sources or Impact: You can also group features based on their sources or the kind of impact they leave on the users. For example, based upon business metrics, you can make clusters of features, or based upon business functions, features can be grouped.
- Metric-based Feature Themes: Do you have a clear and concise idea about the key app metrics you need to drive after? Well, this requires creating metric-based themes to group together features. For example, an enterprise app for digital marketing can have a feature theme like “enhance user engagement” or similar ones.
These groupings make your feature selection easier regardless of the feature grouping method. Some app-based feature selection solutions that many businesses use include Decision Trees, a framework for feature prioritization. Once the basic feature selection is made, one needs to prioritize the feature themes as well.
Segregate App Features by Their Intrinsic Value
Since app features always look great when you look at them yourself, getting rid of such biases is extremely important, and this is where segregating features by their values is a great method. As per this procedure, you need to see the features objectively. You can segregate app features in the following ways.
- Technical Merit: How the proposed app project is technically sound and well equipped with all the required tools and resources. For this, you first need to discuss this with the developers and all the technical team members.
- User Expectations: Do the target app users want it? This requires extensive market research to find out whethe4 the users want to use your app or will find it lovable?
- Coherence: How coherent is the app project against your business goal and user experience attributes. To 7nderstand this, you need to research the business, talk to several key members and find app solutions that do justice to the expectations.
Every one of these criteria is extremely effective in get a detailed idea of the app features and how to choose them. These criteria based on personal opinions must be verified and evaluated through different lenses.
Evaluate How You Intend to Grow
Some app projects fail to evaluate how far they can go, and there are still considerations that remain unattended by most app projects. Evaluating the app’s outreach impact, confidence, and efforts required behind it is crucial. While the entire system tells you to measure only the cost and profit, these metrics will lay bare the feasibility of all the features. Let’s have a quick look at these key areas.
- Outreach: What is the volume of users who are going to use it at a particular period? Outreach can be easily measured using product-oriented metrics such as “monthly transaction volume” or “customers per quarter”.
- Influence: How much market influence and impact can the app create with its user experience and features? It’s great to use a scoring scale that users will click, and choosing a score will give a valid opinion.
- Self-belief: Do you strongly believe that the app features will make the product a success? Judging user confidence is also important whenever you are swayed away by different types of FR features.
- Efforts: How long is the app going to take for development? Based on the number of team members and time spent building the app, you can come up with a transparent figure in terms of time and money.
Go Deeper Into Services from Third-Party Developers
Just when you choose the app features, it is important to note the development and implementation time. Instead of being developed from scratch, some features can be readily availed from third-party developers. This can save huge time and resources for the app projects.
For example, an app can now get help from third-party software to integrate chat functions. There are plenty of such third-party solutions for both iOS and Android, and they can be readily used. You need to go deeper into third-party services and find whether these features add any value to the app project.
Metrics to Decide Features
The best way to measure most app features is using key metrics. This clearly shows the key areas deserve more attention than the rest. Once the app is released, these metrics still guide you about making value additions from time to time.
In this respect, let’s not forget that the key factors for deciding the features also include the business type of app represents, the app development stages, etc. Based upon these factors, the choice of app features can tremendously vary. If you are going to develop a basic MVP app at first, these considerations will come in handy. Several key metrics bring these considerations together for the developers to look upon.
Some crucial metrics you need to focus upon including the following.
- Fulfilling customer expectations
- The lifetime value of the app
- Rates of Adoption for the new app
- Retention rate
- Churn rate
- Daily or yearly active users
- The user volume growth
- The cost of User Acquisition
- ROI revenue per user
Summing It Up
So, choosing app features involving many critical considerations and metrics cannot be easy. It involves rigorous developer efforts to execute the app idea, but deciding the feature set is no less challenging work. All the tips mentioned above have been tested and tried through several successful app projects.
