The Secret to a Successful App Customization: Finding the Good Developer

You need an app to let the world know your business exists. To take it further, you need a quality app to generate continuous traction and convert your audience to tangible business. But your quest for quality continues beyond achieving such and such benchmarks and qualitative parameters acclaimed by the industry.

Since these benchmarks and quality standards continue to evolve with the new technologies, tools, and business approaches, you need to fine-tune the user experience of the app from time to time, or to put it more absolutely, and you need to customize the app to adjust to the evolving user requirements and expectations. The mobile app development cost in India is often lower because of the incremental development approach. We know that such an incremental approach leads to several rounds of custom updates.

Customizing an app cannot be the job of a regular developer, and it needs strong command of the evolving design norms, technologies, and fast-changing user trends. But how do you define these qualities when hiring developers to customize your app? Well, this is what we are going to answer here. But let's start by understanding the need for customizing an app.

What is App Customization and Why does Your App Need It?

App customization involves developing a mobile application that caters to the unique needs of specific audiences. The main goal of app customization is to offer users experiences tailored to their requirements instead of providing a generic, standardized experience for all users. The app customization process ensures that each user's experience is customized to their specific needs, which can significantly enhance user satisfaction and engagement.

Customizing any app is considered helpful for an array of reasons. Let's explain a few of them.

• Awesome User Experience: Customizing an app can level the user experience by catering to individual user needs. The app becomes more intuitive, user-friendly, and instantly captivating, increasing user satisfaction.
• Much Better User Engagement: Tailoring an app to the user's preference can easily push user engagement so that they stay tuned to the app for a longer duration.
• Higher Brand Loyalty: Customizing an app also establishes a connection between the user and the brand, leading to increased brand loyalty and the likelihood of repeated usage.
• Business Conversion Gets Better: A customized app can boost conversion rates by offering users an experience they expect. This is more likely to convert user footprints into orders resulting in increased revenue.
• Access to Rich User Data: Customized apps can access rich data on user preferences, behaviors, patterns, and habits. This data can be used to improve the app's functionality and user experience.
• Competitive Gains: Customizing an app can easily differentiate it from market competition. The unique and improved user experience helps a brand stand out competitively.

Customizing App: The Key Steps Good App Developers Follow

Customizing any existing app, irrespective of the business niche or app category can be challenging for developers since they need to deliver over and above something already existing. But by using the right frameworks, tools, and meticulous approach, they can achieve the customization their customers need. You can always hire mobile app developers in India to get access to a top-notch skill set.

Let's look at some steps developers should follow for customizing any existing app.

• Analyze the Present App Structure: First and way before starting with the customization process, app developers need clarity on the current app's architecture and everything under the fold. Beginning with the codebase, database, user interface design, and features to the usual pain points revealed by existing users. App developers must also look into third-party integrations and APIs and whether they impact the user experience.
• Plan What they Need to App Customize: Once app developers know their current structure, design, features, and pain points, they can determine the customization needs. Understanding the user audience can play a big role in determining the new features, the user interface redesign needs, and the scope for modifying the codebase.
• Determining the Impediments to Customization: As soon as the developers have identified the customization needs, they must also know the impediments and constraints. They must deal with timelines, resource allocation, and other dependencies here. Developers here should also consider the new app's testing requirements and figure out whether the changes will be compatible with the existing backend of the app.
• Start to Change the Codebase: Modifying the app's codebase for changing or adding features and functionalities is crucial. They may also need to refactor the code besides adding new functionalities and tweaking existing features. After doing all these, they must ensure that all the code changes and new code are fully tested and perfectly documented for easy reference and troubleshooting.
• Redesigning the UI: Customizing apps mostly cater to this requirement. Often redesigning the user interface makes drastic improvements to an app. Here developers should ensure that the new UI design remains consistent with the earlier design and offers the same ease of use, if not more. The new design must pass through user testing to achieve its redesign goal.
• Testing the New Customized App: When the customization process is completed, developers must conduct extensive QA testing to check app performance, loading time, and behavior in response to user interactions. How the new changes work with the existing backend of the app is also a crucial consideration. The QA testing process should check the app performance, load time, and usability across different devices, OS platforms, and combinations.
• Deploying the New App: When the app is fully tested and ready for deployment across the target platforms, ensure the entire new version is fully documented. Though customization or redesign is not a fresh release, it is a big update and should be publicized accordingly to catch the attention of the wider audience.
• Assist Users to Get Along: The new app following the customization process is up for users, and certain features and design elements can put existing users into a dilemma. Instead of hoping they will find everything independently, add an on-screen user onboarding and guiding interface to help them explore the new value additions and changes.

What Additional Qualities should Developers have for App Customization?

For your app customization project, you must rely on something other than specific app developer skills or even the developers who were part of a couple of successful projects. It would help if you were experienced developers with years of exposure to evolving technologies and experience across many successful and less successful projects.

Let's understand the rigorous technical skills for app developers required in app customization projects.

• Domain Expertise: Has the developer built a quality app of your niche, or does he possess good knowledge of your business domain and existing challenges? This is a must look for quality in developers working on custom app projects.
• Good Knowledge of Cross-platform Technologies: App customization often means extending an iOS app to an Android version or vice versa. This is why developers should be well-versed in cross-platform technologies like Flutter, React Native, Xamarin, etc.
• Good Command of Different Types of Architecture: Developers working on a customization project should have a good command of app architecture and architecture design patterns like Model-View-Controller (MVC), Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM), etc.
• User Interface Design Knowledge: Developers may not design the user interface but should be able to define engaging and aesthetically appealing user interfaces.
• Testing skills: Since app customization is about improving an existing app, developers must test and address shortcomings. So, to fix issues or troubleshoot processes, developers need good testing and debugging skills.
• Command on Version Control Platforms: Since customization of any app is an update, knowing how to document and update the new version through platforms like Git is extremely important.
• Understanding of Cloud platforms: Developers working on any customization project should also understand leading cloud platforms like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and others.

Keep the soft skills of developers, especially for a customization project. Developers here need to brainstorm new solutions to existing pain points, find solutions to existing pain points, and think unconventionally about adding new features or offering new value additions. The ability to collaborate with the existing IT team is also a key requirement for any app customization project. Apart from the technical skills, the out of the box problem solving ability makes a developer with skills in customization set apart from most others.

Ending Notes

At a time when the bar of the basic user experience standard is set considerably higher, you cannot help but customize the app to tune it to the latest user expectations. This is why app customization can sometimes be as important as releasing a fresh new app product.

If you want to customize your mobile applications or get a rough idea of customizing your business mobile app estimation, Get in touch with us now!