Coding has placed itself as one of the most secure jobs in the current world. The demand is set on a high priority mode for a number of years to come.
This is the reason why more and more people who are even mildly interested in technology are preparing to become coders.
However, even among this stable demand in the job market and the passion to follow the path, a number of people are still thinking twice before getting into it, solely because of the misconception that it would need a degree and years of practice to become a coder and join some glorious app development company.
If you too are the one restricting yourself from realizing your code dream because of this misconception, we have listed down ways that you can learn how to code. A list that has been curated by our team of skilled coders.
Before we get into the ways you can learn how to code, let us look into some of the reasons that are motivating people to learn how to code.
1. What is prompting our generation to take up Coding courses
a. It will be around in the future
When one takes up a course, the idea is to not go with the one whose demand is short lived but go with one that is least replaceable. And, when we talk about the job trends, the one that is going to be around for the foreseeable future and beyond, it is Coding. The tech industry is only going to grow (with many more programming languages coming up) and the only way to grow with it is by joining the club and becoming technical.
b. Demand is much more than supply
The demand for coders is much higher than the number of coders in the industry – a scenario that doesn’t seem to be changing anytime soon.
Having much more demand than the supply comes with its own set of perks. You get to earn much higher than your years of experience and the chance of finding a job irrespective of the geographical boundaries is also much higher.
c. A lot of career options at the back of a strong foundation
If you work on your code foundations today, you will have in front of you a series of career options. Even if you are preparing yourself to be a flappy bird developer, with time you will be able to branch out in coding involved with a number of disruptive technologies like AR/VR, Blockchain, or even AI.
Now that we have seen the reasons that are motivating people across the globe to become coders, let us now look into the ways you can learn how to code, even without a programming language experience or a computer science degree. These are the ways that have been suggested by our team of developers who themselves have developed over 500 apps belonging to a range of different disruptive technologies like Chatbots, AI, and Blockchain, amongst others.
Let’s begin.
2. Ways You Can Learn How to Code Without a Computer Science Degree
Okay, a slight detour again.
Before we get into this journey of learning how to code let me help you finalize a programming language first, the one you should start with.
The basic programming language that I would suggest to start with is JavaScript. The language comes in very handy when you are developing an app – one that can be of any type, no matter how complex. The industry demand for JavaScript developers is extremely high. No matter what job portal you are looking into, you will find a listing for JS developers there.
Also, the JavaScript developer community is an ever growing one. New tools are always coming up in the JavaScript industry, giving you, a beginner, a chance to join the league of developers who come with years of experience in the domain and are yet to explore the new batch of tools.
Once you are adept with JavaScript, expand your learning to a more platform specific language. The present and the near future belongs to Kotlin for Android app developers and Swift and iphone app developers. So, choose a platform that you are even remotely passionate about and invest in its specific language.
Now that you must have gathered an idea of what programming language you would like to delve in further, let us now look into what we gathered here for – to learn how to code when you do not even know its basics.
3. Online Courses to Learn Coding From
Code.org – Their courses are majorly designed for the K-12 students, but anyone who is looking to start fresh in the coding industry can enroll in these courses.
Codecademy – It is a free resource for learning every major web programming language out there in the industry.
Khan Academy – They have a range of topics to meet the learning needs of coders irrespective of their learning level
Learn Swift – If iOS App Development is what you wish to do, the site is your Meccah. It has pages and pages of data that would help you learn Swift.
4. YouTube Channels That Will Help you Code
Learn.code Academy – Topics it Cover – Responsive Design, Sublime Text, Node.js, Backbone.js, Angular.js, Deployment Strategies, etc.
Thenewboston – Topics it Covers – C programming language, Android development, Python, MySQL, etc.
Derek Banas – Topics it Covers – Java, PHP, Ruby, HTML, C++, Python, Android, Assembly language, etc.
5. Blogs you should Follow to Become Better Coders
SitePoint –The blog continuously keeps getting updated with new topics ranging from everything – HTML, CSS, Swift, React.JS, amongst a lot of others.
David Walsh – Managed by Mozilla’s senior developer, David Walsh, the website has a lot of information specific to developers, presented in how-tos, demos, and tutorials.
A List Apart – Have tons of articles for coders irrespective of their expertise level.
SoftwareHow – The blog is a go to the website for anything related to software tools. It comes with a huge collection of guides, tips, and software reviews.
The list would help you immensely at becoming better coders over time. The one thing that you should do though before you drop the idea of learning how to code is at least try one other method of learning, irrespective of what your current mode of learning is.
48% of global consumers accepted that they would rather connect with a company over chat than any other source of contact. 35% of the users would like to see more companies incorporating chatbots. As for the business side of the story, chatbots save around £6 billion per year and a simple chat option in the mobile app brings up the revenue by over 30%.
These are only a snippet of thousands of statistics that are all around the internet and lying on a million office reports hinting towards how chatbot app development has turned out to be the best business decision.
Done right, chatbots can single-handedly make your company approachable and open to business even when you sleep. Done wrong, it leaves users unsatisfied and complaining about how your brand is slow in the logic department.
What helps in making a chatbot effective, besides of course passing all your chatbot success worries to a chatbot app development company, is having a right strategy in place.
1. Have a Purpose
Knowing what purpose your chatbot would solve is the first step in designing a working, revenue-generating chatbot design strategy in 2018.
The last thing that you would want is to join the chatbot world just because every business is on it. While it is true that it benefits a range of different industries, it is also true that not all businesses need it, especially the ones that are working only around a particular geographical location i.e. in the same time zone.
But if yours is a business that would benefit immensely with Chatbots, think of the process that you would like to give your bot the autonomy of. The scale of the process that you are looking forward to leaving in the hands of chatbot will help decide which bot type you have to invest in (more on this later).
2. Conversation Flow
The flow in which your chatbot would converse is one of the most important things for your chatbot design guide to cover.
The ideal situation when it comes to deciding how the conversation should flow is that the bot should start with a general salutation followed by asking questions and then pitching the product when the user put in the respective action words like ‘Tell me More’ or ‘Give more information’.
The biggest mistake that businesses make is pitching in the product as soon as the user becomes active on the website or page when they should go with a more human-like conversation flow.
3. Bot Personality
The only way to make your bot more human-like is to give it a personality. Now when I say personality, I am not implying you to create an avatar and anime man. No, when I say personality, I mean giving it a tone, a difference in the US and UK English, slang, and age-appropriate responses.
Now, in the normal scenario, a business doesn’t have a specific exact type of customer base, so would you keep making bots aiming for each of them to meet specific criteria? The answer is obviously No. What you can do is ask your users’ background and change the initial conversation level of the bot.
4. Give Context From the Beginning
Make the purpose of your chatbot clear from the first two messages itself. Aim for a scenario where your user knows exactly what the bot would be helping them with and have no misinterpreted expectations and then a bad customer service instance.
The first two dialogue to and fro should be enough for your user to know what is to be expected from the chatbot. If you miss this step, the chances are that your bot dashboard will get filled with repeated questions and frustrations of not getting answers.
5. Share before Publicizing
So you have developed an amazing bot that converses with masses effortlessly, specializes in giving the users the exact information that they need, which even varies from context to context. What’s next?
And the answer does not make it live on your website or integrate into your mobile app right away. The answer is to first share it with your in-house teams to see if it’s actually able to answer different questions and different contexts.
By sharing it with the team and taking their feedback, you will be able to track exactly how people are reacting to it and what changes would make the conversation more meaningful.
6. Choose your Words Wisely
The most important element of strategic chatbot development according to chatbot design trend 2018 is choosing the words right. Your copywriting technique should be on point to not just entice the users to start the conversation but keep them hooked enough to convert into your site’s loyal customer or subscriber.
Know that your chatbot copy has the power to make your chatbot a conversion magnet and it should be treated just like that – as a mix of emotions and conversion statements.
So, here were the pointers that would help you draft a killer, high revenue generating chatbot design strategy in 2018. The one that would result in a chatbot that people love to converse with and pay to.
Now that you know what an ideal chatbot should operate like, it is time to look into the three types of chatbots that you should invest in developing once you have your chatbot design guide planned.
The Three Types of Chatbots
1. Menu Based Chatbots
These are one of the most common types of chatbot available in the market today. Using this chatbot, brands give multiple options to the users to select from. These are used mainly when the users are looking for a direct answer.
One of the biggest challenges that businesses face when it comes to menu based chatbots is that the process that users will have to follow to come to the point when they get the desired answer is quite long. They have to click through several buttons and options to come on one point.
2. Keyword Recognition Based Chatbots
These bots utilize the blend of AI and keywords to determine the appropriate response. They lack in performance when they are asked a lot of similar questions with similar sounding keywords, even when the context is different.
A new set of bots are now present in the market that is hybrid. They automatically switch to the menu based type when they are unable to answer users’ queries through AI.
3. Contextual Chatbots
The most advanced of the chatbot family, these bots remember the interaction and its outcome and keeps growing on it to give better result to the users over time. They work strictly on Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence to help users come to a decision.
As they are based on ML and AI technologies, they come with a self-learning ability, which helps in not just customer relationship management but also a positive sales conversion rate.
The ultimate decision of which chatbot type to invest in depends entirely on your business need. If yours is a simple Q&A type app where you aim at giving a quick in and out experience to your users, answering their questions to the point, menu-based chatbot app development is what you should go for. But, in case you have an assistant like mobile app idea, then you will lose your pockets a little and invest in Contextual chatbot development.
Businesses and Entrepreneurs such as you, sometimes spend as high as a million figure to get their application developed and deployed in the stores. The one hope they tie all their effort and money to is generating more than what they earned as revenue from their app.
But, in come reports that over 94% users uninstall mobile apps just after 30-40 days of app install and it hit the businesses hard – Realizing that their app has fallen in the well of those 94% apps.
There are three categories in which you can divide the reasons why users are uninstalling your mobile app –
We will be looking at all the three categories in detail in this article. After all, a clear indication of the problem will only help you with determining how to prevent your mobile app uninstall.
Although, it sounds very obvious but the signs that the app is not developed right are not laid in plain sight. There are a number of issues that businesses ignore to double check when their app is in the development stage, which then goes on to adversely affect the user retention score.
Let us look into them individually so that you know the pointers that you have to pay attention to before you launch that app of yours.
Not Paying Enough Attention to Security
The number one reason that keeps users at bay when it comes to apps that ask for their number, email id or bank detail is the doubt of data breach. Now even if you have kept all the crucial security considerations in mind and practice while developing the app, make it a point that you showcase the badge of security protocol to your users in application homepage, so that they know that their information is secure.
Also, as an added security feature, ensure that the cloud service that you have signed up to save the user data is hack proof. Sit with your mobile app development company and discuss the ways you can make your app tamper proof.
Taking up Way too Much Space on Users’ Device
It is a given but highly ignored fact that your app is not the only application on a user’s device. At any given point of time, users have at least 2 similar app category applications in their smartphone or tablet.
In a scenario such as this, if your app is taking a considerable MB of space on users’ device, you are digging your grave, pretty fast. There are a number of ways to ensure that the app size is small for optimizing the images and videos or manually fixing the app size from the backend. Run your app through those practices before you launch it in the market.
The ‘Application Has Stopped Working’ Message Pops Up A LOT
Nothing annoys an impatient user more than an application that keeps on crashing or asking to run again.
It has been noted that users bear with app hanging or stopping abruptly only till two instances and not more. So, once you start receiving messages or reviews saying that the app hangs a lot, leave everything aside and get it resolved asap.
Look at your code structure and pay extra attention in the app testing to ensure that your app doesn’t hang, or even it does, because of hundreds of queries being generated at the same time, make sure it is an isolated event.
Apart from these three, as long as you have done your testing right and have ensured that the app works like it is supposed to along with making sure that its load time is on point, straight from the application development process, you will be good.
Let us now move on to the next stage, The lack of Ability in Keeping Users Unannoyed, which has less to do with your mobile application development process and more with your incapability to keeping users unannoyed.
Constant Pop-Up Notifications
Sending out notifications saying this and that to your users every hour is one turn off an event. We get it that you want your users to remain hooked to your app, but sending out notifications every hour is more a recipe for pushing them away than of keeping them engaged.
Your notification should be planned. It should come as an effect of user’s movement. Hit their device when they have abandoned your cart or when it’s time for their next lesson. Above everything else, know when to let go. If even after 7 days of zero interaction with the notification, your users are MIA, it is time to let go and stop sending them pop-ups.
Constantly Seeking Rating of the application
If your app is of the kind that constantly asks users to drop a rating in the store, you are headed down the uninstall road. There are hundreds of instances when users are asked to rate an application even when they have left the review days back.
Like notifications, app rating prompt should also be well timed. Ask them to drop in a review when they have achieved something within the app and not when they are either still learning their ways in the app or when they have logged into the app after the longest time.
When you master these two arts and as an added measure, get acquainted with the power of personalization, you will be able to stay in users’ devices for a longer period of time. It’s time to move on to the last element, which you can also call the first nail in your app’s coffin – App Ideation.
Poor Market Research
Chances are that you went into the app game too soon. The time that you should have spent into ensuring that your app idea is different from those in the stores, was spent into wireframing or something else entirely.
Maybe you did not even give enough time into judging whether your app is even solving a real problem or not. Whatever it is that you did in name of less to no market research, is only going to fall hard on you now.
So, here were all the reasons falling into three categories which you can avoid only if you are more cautious during the whole app development process. Now, there can be a number of reasons why users uninstall your app, sometimes as weird as – app was too addictive. The truth is, you cannot always control this. But what you can control is being careful in the whole development and testing process.
Originally incepted as a means to get Play Store to fetch the app listing to place the app higher in the list of category apps, Play Store Optimization has today become a necessary means for businesses to get their apps to rank higher among the list of thousands of similar apps in a category.
Just like your regular Search Engine Optimization mechanisms, Play Store Optimizations also show their effect only when worked from both on store and off store front.
Here is what both the factors entail-
On store factors – These include having the right set of keywords in the app description or its title to enable Play Store search algorithms to fetch them when showing results for a particular category. These features also play a huge role in getting an Android app featured on the store.
Off store factors – These include having enough backlinks coming in from different sources. The sources can be anything – articles, videos, or mentions. Another element that we will be adding here is users’ ratings and reviews. Although, they get uploaded on the store, but the app publishers have no control on them.
For a better understanding of both the factors, read on store factors as the one that the publisher has control on and the off store one as a set of an element that publishers have no control over.
Now that you know the two factors that would directly impact the rank that you are visible on in Play Store search result, let us now get in depth of it – Of getting your app optimized for the Google Play Store to reap the benefits of the time and effort you have spent into getting it developed.
1. Market Research
The first step towards optimizing your app to rule the Play Store chart starts with a thorough market research.
Since the end goal of all your ASO efforts is to get maximum downloads, and app store optimization is 80% about keywords and phrases, you will have to get into your users’ heads to know what they are looking for.
You will have to know who your users are, what are they looking for in an app that they would then move to their home screen and what words are they using to find that application both on search engine and within the app stores.
To understand what is going on in your users’ head, you will have to frequent the place they frequent to show/vocalize their needs.
Once you have their insight, the next entity you will need to analyze in depth is your competitors.
Competitor analysis is as important as knowing your customers’ needs. You will have to gain an understanding of what they are offering to your customers, on what mode, in what context, etc. You will have to pay attention to the power words that they are using in their app description, that are making the users install their app.
Go through their review section and see what experience users are having on their app, visit their Youtube channel or go through their blog sections to know what image they are creating in the market and what their users are liking in their offering as compared to thousand other similar apps.
An insight into both – your customers and your competitors – will show you exactly what your customers are looking for and the words they are using and getting converted with.
2. Keyword Optimization
With a very clear understanding of what your customers are looking for and the standards that your competitors have set, the next stage is to convert those insights into keywords and phrases that your users will search for your app with.
Before we move on the steps to optimize your app description and other app elements on the Google Play Store, let us first look into the process of finding the keywords that you should be putting in your app details page.
There are two ways of finding out keywords to use in your app’s Play Store page –
Use what your competitors are using OR
Go manual and find keywords that the world is using when looking for a product or service in your category.
For the first method, make use of websites like “App Annie” and “Sensor Tower“. Both the websites give you a detailed list of keywords that your competitors are ranking on, which you can copy/borrow/ steal for your own app.
If you are planning to take the manual route, these are the steps that you need to follow –
Step 1: Open your Google Keyword Planner Tool and select ‘Search for new keywords and ad group ideas’ and enter your app domain in the Search bar and click on ‘Get Ideas’. In the list that comes up, do not stress too much about the average monthly searches that are coming up on your query, focus your attention on the ‘Ad Group Ideas’ section. This section will have a list of keywords that users are also looking for or the similar keywords.
Step 2: Use reverse dictionaries available on the internet to get a list of words associated with your keyword.
Step 3: Once you have got the list of keywords ready with you, the next step is to refine the list.
There are three categories on the basis of which you should judge if your keyword is viable enough to get you good ranking on the Play Store or not –
Relevancy with your app idea
Difficulty range under 20
Mid Level Traffic and Search Volume.
These steps would give you a list of keywords that will help you in getting your app’s ranking up in the store along with its visibility and download probability.
Now that you have the refined list of keywords, let us now move on to their usage in your app’s Play Store page.
3. Title
Title is the number one element that needs to be optimized for Play Store. It has a direct impact on both search result and conversion rate. Google has extended the app title character limit to 50 characters since July 2017. To make the most of this space, put in a strong keyword next to the brand name as your app title.
An optimized title can look like any one of these four types –
Brand name: Keyword(s)
Brand name – Keyword(s)
Keyword(s): Brand name
Keyword(s) – Brand name
4. URL
The URL package is another element that can bring in a direct boost in the Play Store ranking number. You can include your keyword in the URL as well to increase its chance at visibility. Remember that you will have to check the Play Store package URL before you publish your app. Once set, it cannot be modified later.
A successful example to prove the point that having keywords in app url impacts its ranking and download probability to a huge extent, is Nintendo’s Super Mario Run game. They have added a very competitive keyword in their URL – Zara, which has made them rank a lot higher than other running games on Play Store.
5. Developer Name
One of the least thought about app page elements which you can incorporate with your keyword is ‘Developer Name’ section. Also, Google saves the Developer History and apps that come with a positive developer history ranks much higher than those who don’t. But coming back to incorporating keywords for making Play Store fetch your app because of your developer name, if you make your primary keyword your developer name, you will be able to rank higher a lot sooner.
6. Short Description
The 80 characters short description section on your app page can easily take your app name up the Play Store ranking list. You should plan the short description in a way that it has the keywords in under 20 characters and explain exactly what your app does differently from the thousands of other similar apps.
The sign of a well crafted short description lies in how seamlessly it blends keywords with the app’s USPs, while giving the users something that would grab their attention in microseconds. To gain users’ attention, a number of brands have started using emoticons in their app’s short description section.
7. Long Description
Play Store App Description section is your place to shine. Unlike Apple, Google offers ample space to its developers to showcase their app, fill in keywords, and convince their users why the app is better than the thousands of similar ones in the market.
In the 4,000 character space that Play Store gives you, make sure that you have entered the keywords and their synonyms in the first line and in the last 5 lines of the description, as that is what will make it searchable.
When drafting your app description, make sure it is well formatted and structured. It should have all the necessary information that would persuade your users to install the app. Feel free to mention your accomplishments, use emojis, have details of the updates you rolled out, and social media profile names for the users to follow through.
8. Icon
In the time when the mobile app users have no time to waste, icons are the first thing that they see before deciding whether to even click on the app detail or not. A clearly distinctive icon is what triggers maximum click throughs. For a business to make a lasting impact on its users, the icon needs to be picture perfect and an exact representation of what the app is about.
The biggest mistake that you can make is uploading a pixelated image because you were unsure of the icon size. Although, your partner mobile app development company will handle this for you, but for the sake of expanding your knowledge, here is the image detail –
32 Bit png
512X512 Dimensions
1024 Kb File Size
There are some things that you need to be wary of when it comes to designing your app icon, such as –
No copying of design and layout,
Avoid having text on the icon photo,
Use the latest design trend present – it can be gradient or line icon or something absolutely fresh in the market.
Lastly, until you become all famous and popular, avoid using icons that are not self explanatory of what the app is about.
9. Feature Graphic
The next visual cue that your users will follow after your app icon is the feature graphic. A well designed feature graphic is not just a stepping stone to taking users to the next stage, but also a major driver of conversion rate.
Google has set two requirements for the app feature image –
24 bit png or jpeg
1024X500 Dimensions
Here’s how you can optimize the feature graphic of your android app
Do not place any necessary information by the bottom or near the borders of the image
Use Large Font Size
Keep changing it according to different schemes or campaigns
Localize the text in your featured image, if any (more into this later in the article)
Continuously keep A/B testing your featured image and its content to see what works with your users and what doesn’t.
10. Video
Paste YouTube URL in the “Promo video” section of your Google Play Store listing to add video to your app page. Videos have become one of the most powerful marketing tools of today’s time when the users are getting less and less patient. One of the coolest things about adding a video in your app page is that the views that you get on your play store listing gets added to your YouTube views count, automatically.
Before you upload a video on your app page, know of these two requirements –
Use an individual YouTube URL instead of the URL of a Playlist or Channel
Make sure that the video is not age restricted and that everyone can view the video.
Lastly, just like you did with your feature image, localize your app video as well to reach a greater user base.
11. Screenshot
Screenshots are your only way to create an impression about your app in front of the users. They provide a direct look into how your app looks and moves. In fact, majority of the onlookers get converted into app installers on the basis of the screens they are shown.
Your screenshots should be the best representation of your app’s features. You can even add texts or highlights on the screens to explain a complicated image. Don’t restrict to uploading just two screenshots, use all the slots that Google has given you. It also helps when your screenshots move from one to other in form of a story, so give it a shot.
Google has laid down a number of guidelines that are to be followed when it comes to uploading screenshots on the page, here they are –
320X384 Dimensions
24 bit png or jpeg
With this, we have now covered all the on-store factors that can up your ranking in the Play Store, and now it is time to move on to the off-store factors, which are not in control of the app publishers.
12. Rating & Review
The first element that has an impact on play store ranking is the rating and review section of your app description page. While you don’t have a direct impact on whether users would like your app or not, you can most definitely make it easy for them to like your app by giving them an app that they would love, by default.
By being active in the review section, you can create an impression that the issues are heard and by constantly adding updates that touches upon those issues will also make you your users’ favorite. But, above all, the only resort to getting higher stars and great reviews is by offering your users an app that they need, that comes bug free, and ultimately is something that offers some value in their life.
An important thing to consider here is that you should at all times be responsive. Don’t let your users think they are unheard or ignored.
13. App Update
Another non keyword related element that has an impact on bringing up the app ranking is App Updates. To be in trend and to keep offering your users something new ever so often, you will have to keep updating your android application. It can be as minor as a bug eradication or can be as major as a UI/UX change.
Although, there is no written time when an app should be updated, but you should aim for updating your app at least once in every 30 to 40 days. And, once you do, your users should be informed of the same. They should know that the app was updated and the details of the new update.
While you can send an email to every user individually, highlighting what the update was about, but the ideal practice is add the details in your app description section under What’s New or Update (version name).
14. App Localization
There are a number of statistics doing round all over the internet, hinting towards how app localization hold the immense potential of bringing in a sharp rise in the app revenue charts. Majority of the Play Store users, as opposed to the common beliefs, belong to non english speaking nations, a section that is majorly ignored when an app is designed, developed, and promoted.
Lately more and more brands are coming up with localization tactics to expand their users base and growth, revenue chart. What it means to localize is not just translating the language from dialect A to dialect B, it means changing everything from videos to visuals according to the audience that is meant to cater.
Suppose yours is a language teaching app, now instead of explaining everything your app is about in English in your screenshot or video or even your feature image, have them designed and developed in a variety of different languages, so that the native speakers get attracted towards the app as well.
15. A/B Testing
There is no single point formula to ranking high on the Play Store listings specially when you are competing with million of other mobile apps. You will have to constantly keep making tweaks here and there to see what is working and what is users not responding to.
What we would suggest is that keep changing your screenshots, app descriptions. Keep shuffling your keyword list and changing your app’s details accordingly. It is only when you will constantly change your app’s look and read, your users would get to see something new on the page, creating a curiosity to install the app again, if uninstalled earlier.
A/B Testing should be a continuous process, you should always remain in touch with your app developers so that you are always in trend when the app users compare you with the thousands of apps in the similar category.
16. App Indexing
The idea is that the maximum traffic you send to your app listing page, the more higher you go up in ranking charts. Now, the process of sending traffic off to your mobile app listing is not an easy one to follow. You will have to promote it in enough places and among a range of different people.
Apart from promotion, you will also have to invest time in getting your app listing page indexed. Two quick ways to make your app indexing ready are –
Focusing on Nouns as keywords
Having related words phrases as well, in addition to the specific seed keywords.
So here was the complete guide of getting your app higher on the ranking charts.
The two takeaways and parting notes that I want you to take along with you as you step in this cut-throat competition are –
A. Choose your Keywords Wisely, go with ones that have medium level traffic and competition and
From running away from Zombies to running after Pokemon, the users are becoming more than avid gamers. The majority of people today are using these apps to shed their weight, live a healthier life and get a perfect figure to flaunt in a swimming suit – and that also without spending a huge amount of money in getting gym memberships and adjusting their daily routines.
According to Flurry statistics, the health and fitness apps have become significantly popular in the past few years. A rise by 330% has been recorded in the adoption of fitness apps in last three years. Besides, it has been observed that users are accessing these applications at least twice a week and at most 10 times a week. And with the advent of wearables like fitness bands, the users are becoming more motivated to use these applications for enjoying their lives healthier. This, as a whole, has driven the demand for fitness apps like Fitbit.
If you belong to the fitness industry, this is a call for you to invest in fitness application development and leverage huge benefits from this lucrative opportunity. But before you begin with, you must be familiar with the features that can make your app popular like Fitbit app, about which we will discuss in this blog.
Features Your Fitness App Must Have
There are different types of fitness mobile applications – there are weight loss apps, nutrition and diet apps, on-demand personal trainer apps, exercising and workout apps, and so on. To decide the features, you must determine the type of app you want to develop firstly. However, the following can be considered as the basic features that can be included in all the types of application:
1. Account Creation
As fitness apps are for serving individuals, personal account creation is the foremost feature to consider. The end users must be facilitated with the opportunity to have an individual account where they can feed their personal data, choose all the elements/facilities they want, and track their journey conveniently. It is advisable to keep the profile creation process simple and seamless. The process should not be time-consuming and complicated. The best way to provide effective account creation services is to let the users sign up not only by email, but also by using social media credentials. This will ease the process while helping you to gather the required information and use. from this, if you are designing a fitness application with subscription options, let users store billing information and pay easily via payment gateway integrated into your mobile application.
2. Social Media Sharing
Who doesn’t like to brag about his achievements on social media platforms? We all do it, right? Because of the same reason, social media sharing should be in your fitness application feature checklist. When the users could share their goals and achievements within the app, they will feel good about using the app and do ‘word of mouth’ marketing. Besides, people in their social media networks will come to know about your app and look forward to using it, which means cost-effective brand awareness and marketing.
3. Design
While designing a fitness app, the mobile app developers must ensure the simplicity, usability and interactivity. The design of the app must not be confused or the procedure must not be time-consuming as it would affect the user’s interest. The clickable and minimalistic icons should be considered for adding to the home screen so that the user could easily reach the different sections. The screen must be presented in the form of a sheet to help users easily find what they have done, what they are doing and what they have to do so as to achieve their target. The app should be interactive, gesture-focused and based on the color psychology, i.e., calm colors must be added to generate positive energy.
4. Personalization/Setting Targets
Every user has different body features, needs and expectations. Providing them with the same fitness course won’t be favorable. So, it is vital to facilitate them with the service of personalization. Let them set their own targets and timeline, decide which exercise/activity they want to practice and when, what supplements they will intake during this course, and so on. When fitness apps provide personalized features, users tend to be more consistent, and thus, the app goes viral.
Apart from this, you can also add VR technology into your application – allowing smartphone users to create a VR fitness room and workout in groups.
5. Notification System
A missed workout can hamper the user’s enthusiasm as well as interaction with your application. So, it is vital for every fitness app development company to invest in the notification system. With a perfect notification system, you can prompt users to use your applications regularly. Besides, it can provide you extensive know-how with which you can understand the user behavior and deliver a better experience. However, bear in mind not to push too many notifications that annoy users (the frustrated users would definitely leave your application for never returning back).
6. Gamification
Music in the gym and fitness stations make losing calories more a fun, right? What if you could get the same feel in a mobile application? With the concept of gamification, you can easily add fun elements to your app processing, making it more engaging. By incorporating different elements like Badges, Rewards, Leaderboards, and Progress bar, you can increase the user acquisition and retention rate.
7. Geolocation and Wearable Integration
If you are developing an outdoor fitness app, these two technologies are must to integrate into your application development process. Geolocation functionality will let the user know the path, traffic and minimal time required for going through the track. It will also help them to track the user activities such as no. of steps taken, cycling, swimming, etc. With this data collected using GPS, you can easily calculate and share the insights gained, because of which the users would start appreciating your application.
While integrating your app into wearables like smartwatches and bracelets will empower you to monitor user’s steps, heartbeat rate, pulse rate in real-time and provide valuable advice using these insights. Tip: There are various public APIs and developer’s kit for integrating wearables into your fitness app, like Misfit, Garmin Wellness and Pebble. Determine which one is apt for your app processing and look forward to using it.
8. Chat Feature
With a chat feature, users will be able to interact with a team of fitness experts and get the best-customized solutions related to their health and fitness concerns. Besides, the users will be able to interact with other fitness freaks and create daily challenges based on their potential and needs. This way, the chat feature will boost user engagement and app success ratio.
9. Audio/Video Guide
Amp the workout experience with an audio/video guide. A guide, just like an instructor, will help the fitness application users to understand the right way to do exercise and workout. This will lessen the risk of injuries due to inappropriate postures, boost their experience and motivate them to perform exercises daily.
10. Activity Log
Recording the daily interaction of the app with the user is also a crucial factor to consider while designing a health and fitness mobile application. The recorded stats inform fitness freaks how much calories they have reduced and how much time is it required to reach their decided goal. This supercharges them to be more active and workout religiously.
Tip: To speed up the development process and cut down the cost, employ Google Fit APIs and HealthKit to access health and fitness related data.
11. Data Security
Remember the data breach case of Strava app? The app aggregated the US military men sensitive information to provide personalized fitness and workout services. However, shared the information publicly without their consent. This incident has turned the smartphone users more conscious about the security and privacy policies of the mobile applications they use, which implies you need to work on the data privacy and security aspect.Optimize your app performance and ensure that there’s no data leakage point so as to win the trust of mobile users and prompt them to use your application. Also, make it certain that your app follows the guidelines of HIPAA and other such health privacy compliances.
12. Multi-device synchronization
Just like Fitbit, you can also embed multi-device synchronization feature in your application. This feature will be highly appreciated when the user does not have the synchronized fitness tracker but want to workout. Allowing them to sync another device will make it easier for them to practice religiously and reap the benefits. This will boost customer loyalty.
13. Reviews
The reviews section is of utmost importance to both the users and developers. By collecting feedbacks, the developers can easily find out what challenges users are facing while using the app, what are the glitches in the fitness application and how can they work on improving the customer experience.
Now, as you know the features that could make your fitness app popular and useful as Fitbit, take no time to plan the process and invest in the development process. If you already have the plan ready but are confused at the costing, Anteelo team would love to assist you. Our healthcare app development experts will understand your market needs and suggest the best tech stacks to include in your development project along with outlining the cost to build a fitness application.
Getting funded for an app idea that you strongly believe in is every entrepreneur’s dream. And, sadly the recurrent news of tech startups getting funds just on the basis of their app idea, doesn’t really help the case. In fact, it’s more scary than motivating.
To start with, forget about those tech startups and their ideas and concentrate on yours.
And now that your app idea has your undivided attention, let’s slide off another thing – the reason your startup haven’t set its feet off the ground it is because you are being unrealistic. Either you have not started working on your idea or you are a headless chicken running in all directions with no one point destination.
Either way, there’s a long way to go from here.
Let’s begin.
We will take you through the similar layout which we follow when entrepreneurs seek our Mobile App Consultancy service that revolves around ‘How to Get Funds’ issues.
We will begin with why you need funding and then we will move on to the element that investors look for when they put in their funds in an app idea, even though the world is now officially sitting on 5 million + apps (we will spend some time on this point) and lastly we will look into avenues where you can find investors for your mobile app.
Why Do you Need Funds in the First Place
So you have an app idea that would work perfectly in changing the economic scenario of a village in the African subcontinent – as conveyed to you by your family and neighbors.
What you do is make rough estimates of the involved costs and time and approach an investor to get their money. Will this work? No.
You need funds to validate your idea in a real market with real users and find if they even need the solution (or it was a problem that only existed in your short sighted head).
Now, suppose you made an app to solve the real African issues and the users there accepted and saw a life change because of it, what next? Would you be able to scale your app outside of the one village with the X amount of money on you?
I guess we both know the answer to that.
You need funds to first convert your app idea into a full fledged app and then to keep growing it to reach the masses. Now, don’t be naive and think that your app will generate the money for you, it never happens at least not enough to make an empire out of your app idea.
But, if you are one of those businesses who are only creating an app for a local community and that too for social causes and have no intention to make money at the back of it, this article is not for you. So long.
If, however, you belong to the category of budding entrepreneurs who wish to make a name in the industry and earn millions and millions worth of revenue and billions of eyeballs, it is time I let out the secret of what Investors actually look for.
What Do Investors Look for in Companies/Ideas They Fund
The honest but soul crushing answer to this is that they invest in brands and entrepreneurs who have developed a relationship of that sort with them over the years. But, we know the percent is well under 5% and you along with the 95% of the new entrepreneurs are born to fight, so let’s roll up our sleeves and get that app dream of your some money.
Since you have been with us this long, it is time to let you on the secret to getting your desired amount of funds (if your idea is actually as amazing as you think it to be).
The Secret to Getting Funds on Your Mobile App Idea
*Cutting straight to the chase* What investors look for when deciding to credit their money into your – the amazing app idea innovator – bank account is validation.
Validation, both in terms of app usage ability and its acceptance level.
Will touch bases on both the validation points now.
To start with, the route to validating your app’s usage ability, you will have to launch it in the market of real users and that is where your weapon of mass funding comes in – Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
What is MVP?
To test an idea that you strongly believe in, which the world needs and would love, you develop a working, functioning model that you then pass along in the market to test the waters. This working, functioning model aka your guinea pig is the MVP.
You contact team of skilled mobile app developers and create an MVP with the basic features without putting too much of your time, money, and efforts into it and you gauge its engagement and feasibility that then defines if at all you should continue with the idea or tweak it around or the worst case scenario, drop it.
The secret is out: MVP is the tool that investors base their funding decisions on.
Now, the definition of MVP as – A product that is launched with minimal features that best describe the issues and the future of the application and your whole startup – comes with a string attached with many other questions such as – What features to use? How to know if the solution the app is offering even needed? All the features are unique, how can I remove even one?
Don’t worry, we will give you an answer to all your questions
Steps to Developing an MVP That Gets Funded
1. Know What You Are Validating
The first question when you start with your MVP development process doesn’t even start with its features. Sounds crazy, right? Bear with me here.
The first point of validation comes with knowing if at all there is a mass problem that would get solved with a mobile app. Suppose your app idea is to keep exam results and feedback on student’s performance on mobile.
The first question you will have to ask is if at all teachers have the time to first correct the papers and then upload them on the app and then add comments and if the students would be willing to see their results like this instead of in person.
Once you the answer to that, find out if the educational system would be open to a solution as this or if there will be any conflicts.
2. Talk to Your Real Users
Instead of restricting your talk to your aunt who teaches Math in a private school, expand your bases. Talk to teachers all over the city – of schools that are maintained by some private company and of those who are operating within the meagre means offered to them by the local government.
Find out the pain points in the process that starts with a teacher correcting the papers and ends at students getting feedback on their performance. Make a list of points that can be solved through mobility.
3. Know What Features to Add
Follow a Deconstructed Pareto Method to Decide on the Features that your MVP Should Consist of.
Once you have identified the exact needs your user group, and have a list of features – both primary and supportive – that would solve the need perfectly, ready on you, use the 80/20 Pareto Analysis rule to refine the list of features further. Keep the 80% features that would solve all the problems as your MVP features and keep the 20% features as a part of future updates.
This way you will be able to hit two birds with one stone. A. You will be giving your users exactly what they need and B. You will be adding the additional features, which they also needed, later; which would create your image as a brand that really listens to what its users asks of it.
Now that you know what goes into the blood and bone of a tool that would help generate funds, don’t wait. Get out of your chair and hit your app market and then don’t wait further when the app is launched.
As long as the buttons work, the app is functioning, and the user is able to move within as you want them to, launch the MVP.
With this, we have now come to a point where we answer the one question that is on every Entrepreneur or Start-up’s minds – Where to Find Investors to Fund My Mobile App?
Unless you are not waiting to hearing back from the Shark Tank producers to invite you on the show, here are the four more attainable and easy to reach platforms to attract investors and raise funds for your app
Kickstarter
Indiegogo
AppBackr
AppStori
Here we go. Now you have all the insights that you need to get started with to raise money for your app idea.
In the next 5 minutes, you will gather all the knowledge about repulsing potential customers with the help of your website. But if you continue reading after that, we will let you in the secrets of how not to do that.
Every smart marketer knows what kind of impact a good website can have on a business’s conversion rates – A Big One. And this magic wand becomes an even more crucial key to conversions for startups and small businesses.
There are two major kinds of mistakes that can sum up a Bad website – Design mistakes and Usability mistakes.
Well, the good news is, mistakes can be corrected. However, if you’re one of those businesses who have altogether skipped bringing your business on a website, then it is just bad news for you.
Without procrastinating a day more, you should start working on building a website for your business but before that, read on, to find out the dos and don’ts of business websites and how they make you money.
What is the most basic function of a website? Delighting the visitorsWhat is that the website should not do? Annoy the Visitors.
It is that simple. But only for a more elaborate discussion, let us take into account that what are the mistakes made by developers and designers in creating a website that might end up annoying visitors, aka Potential customers, instead of helping them.
A. Purposeless Pagination
Pagination is the process of splitting up the contents of a web page into multiple pages because displaying too many articles and images on a single page make it bulky and hard to load. It is often done for web pages with a long list of articles or items and it makes sense.
Although, there is another reason for which the process of Pagination is being used for a purpose which is plain annoying for users. Some websites divide a single article into multiple pages in order to increase page views. More than a few websites and blogs earn their revenues with the help of advertising and getting page views.
While this may look like an easy way to earn extra bucks but besides being irksome for users, it also poses a serious problem. That is, search engines analyse the content of each of your website pages and indexes these pages according to the content of those pages along with keywords. If each page is divided into multiple pages, it dilutes the content and thus it will negatively affect the page ranking of your website.
B. Broken Links
One of the most annoying things on any website is seeing the “404” error pages. These are the hyperlinks that lead nowhere. For the best way to avoid these best links, you need to thoroughly test your website as regularly as possible. For a little help, you can even include a “contact the webmaster” link at the end of your web pages so that if a user finds a broken link, they can quickly inform you and they can be fixed immediately.
C. Having Multiple Font Styles
Any web page or all the web pages of a single website need to have a uniformity in terms of style, colour theme and typography. This helps the website in having an acquired consistency but what most novice website developers do not understand is that using multiple font styles does not add to the site aesthetics, instead, they make it look like a mash-up of an immature website.
Your website should be able to ensure the visitors of your stability, maturity and reliability and not otherwise. It is also important to test your aesthetics over a number of devices and learn how to create a high conversion website.
D. Bad Navigation
A website should allow the users to seamlessly navigate through the website without the need to ask another person about the whereabouts of any particular section. Users must be able to find their way around as easily as possible and not struggle to find a certain information on the website.
For getting over a bad navigation, textual descriptions can be used for all the links. Always remember that users are impatient for any new website and if they cannot find their way around in 3 clicks or less, they will leave immediately.
E. Complicated Registration Process
Registration pages are a tricky business. Many a time, websites ask for information that they do not need and it becomes a hassle for the users to fill in the entire form and not to mention if they mistakenly reload the page and then are asked to fill in the whole information again. This is a recipe for driving users away at first glance. Gone are the days when users used to fill out a long form for every registration process.
SO even though you make your registration process mandatory, you need to do a research on the form details and choose the mandatory details only. After all, for signing up for a newsletter, users do not need to fill their Father’s name.
After going through the major mistakes most website designers end up making, we ought to learn about the corrections of these mistakes which do nothing other than driving the users away. Therefore, let us take a look at how to convert website visitors into customers.
Ways to Make Your Website A Conversion Magnet
In order to build a conversion focused web design, there are certain things to take care of and not to let the big mistakes of website design come into your way to convert traffic into sales. In fact, let us move forward and see how to make your website a customer generating machine.
In order to attract more traffic in a way that they’ll be interested in doing business with you and your company, you need to take care of the following things with the utmost importance.
1. Work Upon the Readability
There are very simple ways to enhance user experience with the readability for your website visitors. It can be done in two ways: Always compare your website’s colour schemes with that of other websites of the same business domain as yours and understand how they are able to portray their seriousness and maturity through their website. And also, how can you apply their methods to improve the readability of your website.
Use a more readable and clear font for your website typography. The best to use is Sans serif typeface since it allows easy reading on the web.
2. Work Upon an Organized Content Layout
Let’s face it – any website’s content is the driving force of traffic. Therefore to increase website conversions, paying extra attention to the content is what is required of the website developer and designer. It is highly crucial to know that the structure of website content can either make it a success or a failure.
In order to organise content on your website, use HTML and CSS while designing the paged of your website. Apart from that, there should be enough whitespace between the images and text with the use of margins.
Also, it is very important to regularly update your content and website pages. And updating the content does not mean adding more content but rather to find out and correct past mistakes.
You can also look forward to hiring a “web gardener” in your content team who will basically root out old mistakes and keep the web content up to date.
3. Consistency in UI Design
Some new designers take the UI design to the next level and put excessive elements of design without a theme to work with. Sometimes they even go far enough to apply a different theme for every page of the website. It does not matter how wonderful the individual design elements are if the overall consistency of the website is missed, converting the website visitors to leads can turn into an unachievable dream.
For avoiding this inaccuracy, the website designers should use a consistent design template for every one of the web pages along with embedding the links to the main page of the site.
Aesthetically, simple design is the key to creating a conversion focussed web design.
4. Having a User-Friendly Screen Resolution
I can say with certainty that we all have, at some point of the other, visited a website where we had to scroll horizontally or zoom out to get a full look of the page. This happens because the screen resolution is not tested among multiple devices.
A good website designer will always take care of the fact that his/her website should fit the devices and screens of all sizes and resolutions. Unarguably, this is a difficult task to include all the different devices in the design but still, we can use different tools that can help the designers to learn how to optimise your website for more conversions for the majority of the devices.
Services such as Google Analytics can help you in gathering information about the various monitor resolutions of your users and this information can be used in the design update of your website.
5. Careful Usage of Graphics
For a big customer conversion Idea – Never use too many graphics/images/animations on your web pages. Although, it is true that images can gain the user’s attention but it can also work as a distraction from the main content of the website. Instead of stuffing the website with as many images as possible, they should be used at subtle guides for helping the user to understand the content and navigate through the website.
The appropriate use of Graphics and animation is how to boost conversions on your website, so use them wisely.
To sum up, the above-mentioned mistakes and the ways to correct them are not limited to these elements. All the good website designers and developers are aware of the power a website holds over the conversion rate of deals and that’s why, we, at Anteelo, build a website as an extension of the mobile app for our clients.
There are delicate methods that we apply to the websites that we build to ensure converting website visitors to leads as much as possible.
To know how you can improve your website and get more customers, head on to our Product Design service section to know what we do to make websites a conversion magnet.
Only a few years ago, any and all forms of motion and animation was associated with the definition of a bad site UI. Remember the old age advertisement websites which showed offers in circular balls bouncing off from one corner of the screen to another? The case of motion in web design was a sad case.
But ever since the advent of mobile apps, the scenario has changed so much so that UI motion design has now become a popular design trend.
A modern-day interface is no more about static elements. With UI motion design, brands are now covering the void between software and human primal need of variety and connection.
“The most intuitive and pleasurable element of web and mobile application services are the one that involves Motion Design.”
Incorporated at different mobile app journey stages, motion design for apps can not only make the users swoon over your app movements but also increase the app session time. They have now become a symbol of fun, innovativeness, and a sure shot medium of binding users with the applications.
Why use motion design for apps?
There are a number of ways apps motion design has made the overall mobile interactions a completely interesting one. Here, let’s see how.
Slow App Loadings are Now Enjoyable
Slow loading apps are as common in occurrence as days and nights since they happen all the time. There can be a number of issues behind it such as low network from the users’ front, a technical issue on the backend, or too many requests being made on the server at the same time. But, irrespective of the reason, slow load time is the number one reason that takes the users away from the app.
Well, this can be prevented completely by using animation in the app UI design which was one of the mobile app trends of 2018. By adding motion elements in every case of low load time, designers can keep the users hooked just to see the elements or the animation to glide on the screen. For instance, take Google Chrome’s offline page with a dinosaur game.
An Onboarding Experience for users
One of the most common use cases of Motion Design for apps is seen in the Mobile App onboarding stage of the app journey. Used to explain and make the user acquainted with the app, the animation is being incorporated by brands to make it easy for the users to find their way around for the first few runs.
Emboss App in Users’ Minds with Mental Map
Taking the Onboarding Experience to the next level, mobile UI designs help users create a mental map that fits the app flow in the mind. Ever noticed yourself pulling the top Gmail bar down to refresh your mailbox? We doubt it. The reason is that it has been embossed into us just like blinking of the eyes, so we no more have to think twice, it happens automatically.
Letting users know what’s wrong and what’s right
Motion elements can be one of the most impactful ways of letting the users know that they have encountered an issue or that they have crossed a level successfully. When designing to highlight an error, it is important to point out to users exactly what they are doing wrong.
Wrong password shake is the one animation that achieves it perfectly. Just like you show what users are doing wrong just with your motion, the feedback motion should also show the successful events. A simple mailbox popup with a tick mark animation would show the users that their mail was sent.
In the end, never keep the users wondering what they are doing wrong or if they were able to do something successfully.
Now that you have seen how motion elements make the app journey more fun and memorable, let us now look at the app UI design principles that you should employ to keep your motion elements from crossing over to the side of tackiness and uselessness.
The Walt Disney Articulated Principles that you Should Embody in Your Mobile App
Every app development company that has worked with motion elements know that the line between innovation and overdoing it is very thin and it is the place where they blur, the problem begins. Users become disinterested and apps go from being useful to becoming plain confusing.
To prevent your motion signs and movements from seeing a similar fate, you can follow these interaction design inspiration. These principles were first articulated by Walt Disney but are still capable of delivering a memorable enjoyable experience just like Mickey Mouse.
1. Motion Movement Trajectory
The design principle that has been prevalent in the industry follows the rule that animated shapes should mainly follow a straight trajectory movement. But we all know better. You cannot really offer an outwardly Web and Mobile Application Design Service with one leg in old traditions. To make users fall in love with your motion elements, you will have to add new movement trajectories such as curves, verticals, and even wave like and then show people those things visually.
2. The timing of when the Motion appears
Any motion prompt that comes at users’ screen out of the blue without any action motivating it, should be avoided. If you are incorporating motion in your app UI design, do it at a time which asks for it. There are times when it makes sense to add motion like when users enter the wrong password but an animated tick to show they have entered the right credentials can be ignored.
So, before you overboard with them, know at what stage they are actually needed.
3. Focus on the Focus of Animation
If your app has a lot happening on the screen in terms of content, design elements, image or video wise, have a motion element that comes with a tinted blinking background or blurs in and out so that users know what to do next. All your immovable motion features will lose their value if you fail to show their presence on the app screen.
4. Animation Speed
Assuming that you would be making a mobile app for ordinary humans and not Flash, your motion elements should move at the speed of a feather glide. Give users time to adjust their eyes to the movement instead of making it too fast for them.
A pro tip: Add rhythm to your motion. While adding movement into movement seems like a nonsensical thing to do but know that by doing it, you will be going one step ahead of the whole app resonance game straight from the users’ subconscious level.
5. Become an On-the-face Motion Piece
Used mostly in flashcard quiz based and eCommerce apps, these motion types makes the next move a no-brainer for the users. By moving too evidently, like in case of a discount countdown or the drop of location pin in case of Uber, you will be able to lead the users exactly where you want to be while creating a memorable brand image for yourself.
How is animation and motion used in mobile apps?
Like we said before, there is a thin line between doing it and overdoing it. There are places where you think you can use animation but in reality, you can simply avoid it. There are a few ways you can use motion design which makes the best UI design for apps. Let’s take a look at them:
Gamification
Adding emojis and animation mascots can do wonders for your app. These elements make the app addictive and likeable by all. Various messengers have animated mood stickers which give the app an edge over all the other plain messaging apps.
Progress animation
Waiting for something to load without knowing the progress tests a users patience. This is why apps have progress animations that show how much progress has been made while loading certain functions. Progress animation is one of the most liked features of motion design for apps.
Animated notifications
Notifications are usually quite boring but if proper animation is used then it improves the overall user experience. This will also make sure that users remember every important notification they get.
Loading animation
Loading animation is one of the most common types of animation used for app UI interactions. This type of animation informs the users that the process of loading is active and that the app is running well. This animation is a sub-type of progress animation.
Transition animation
Transition animation gives the app a classy look. It also conveys a positive user experience. By allowing transition, you give more life to the app when going from one page to another.
Marketing animation
Marketing animation is great for your brand. Animations used in logos is a great way of grabbing the attention of the users. This also creates a mental image of the brand on the users’ mind.
Scroll animation
Scrolling animation is another famous type of animation added in apps and is considered one of the best UI design for apps. Not only it makes the app beautiful but also gives it an elegant look. However, proper scroll animation needs proper coding otherwise the app may freeze or slow down.
Drawing attention
Attention drawing animation is usually applied when the attention of users needs to directed to certain areas. Suppose, you are ordering from an online food ordering app and as soon as you add items the price changes with a certain kind of animation. This would draw your attention to the numbers which is where the focus should be.
In the article, we have discussed how motion elements are the key differentiator between a boring app and an innovative one, the right stages for incorporating them and even the design principles that should be followed. We being best mobile app design company, follow a simple mobile app designing process to achieve the best results possible. Even though the steps are easy, the work is detailed. If you have any queries regarding motion designs or need interaction design inspiration, contact us at Anteelo.
Whenever we talk about the latest trends that the mobile app development companies will be hit by in the coming times, one of the trends among the top 10 is mobile payment apps.
With the industry expecting to benefit over $86 Billions from the domain’s mass adoption, mobile payment apps are on a sure shot growth chart – both in terms of users and the generated revenue.
Although, seeing the users shift from currency notes to mobility, a number of brands have emerged in the revolutionary field, there are only a few which the users have grown accustomed with and are using for their everyday transactions.
In this article, we will look into the seven mobile payment apps – both for fiat money and cryptocurrency that are now witnessing maximum downloads and acceptance.
But, before we begin, let us look into the various type of mobile payment options that are presently in the market.
Different Type of Mobile App Payments
1. SMS Payments
SMS based mobile app payments simply mean paying for a product through a text message that is sent by one user to another. Since it does not involve knowing the card and bank details, it is considered one of the most safest and credible mPayment methods.There are websites like instamojo that offer payment gateways to aid SMS Payments. What they do is that they create payment links which can be then send over to the customers or your friends, who get multiple payment options like Net Banking/ Debit and Credit Card/ UPI/ Wallets when they open the link.
2. Mobile Wallets
Popular examples of Mobile Wallet Apps would be Apple Pay and Google Pay. The idea of Mobile Wallet app or the answer to how mobile wallet works is that it is a platform where you can save your card information, so that when you buy products, you won’t need to carry your card with you, physically, card on you. Apart from aiding direct purchases with the ease of saved card information, users can also make on spot purchases through barcode and fingertip scan induced payments, which come packaged as part of their smartphone app. Since mobile wallets deal with bank information, they make use of the EMV technology which includes creation of one time password that is then sent to the user’s bank to verify.
3. NFC
Although a fairly new entrant in the mobile payment market, NFC payment apps have already themselves a widespread adoption. Using the Near Field Communication technology, smartphones connect with each other or with Point of Sale devices and then payment can be made with the help of radio frequency identification method. But, in order to make successful NFC payments, the devices need to be at least 4 inches close to each other.
4. WAP Payments
WAP Payments mean making payments on a web page or application through an active internet network. Whenever users directly buy a product off a website from their smartphone, without going through mobile apps that save their card information, they are making WAP Payments. For Example: Suppose you like a shirt on Amazon, now when you make payment on Amazon by filling in your bank account data, you are doing a Mobile WAP Payment. Almost all your other mode of Mobile Payments such as mobile wallets, sms payments, are a part of WAP Payment.
Now that you know the different ways you can make payments using nothing but your smartphone, here are the mobile payment apps for business and P2P payments that are currently witnessing maximum demand from the 59% of global millennials who are on a verge of kicking currency notes out of their life and becoming 100% digital, money transaction wise.
The Most In-Demand mWallet/mPayment Apps
Here is the list of the top 10 Payment and Mobile Wallet Apps for Android and iOS that have gained immense popularity for themselves within a decade (as for the cryptocurrency ones, within a time span of two years).
SmartphoneApps Used for Making Payments
Apple Pay
Apple Pay app is present on every iPhone device on and after iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus. The app that has created new standards for iPhone application development companies, is accepted as a mode of payment in over millions stores worldwide like Trader Joe’s, Staples, and Walgreens, among a number of other international retail chain.
Moreover, using Apple Pay, users can purchase stuff off from Safari browser. There are a number of online stores, which also accept Apple Pay option at the time of checkout. The application is present for use in the United States along with a number of other countries.
Android Pay
Available for download in the Android devices, Android Pay app is also accepted at over million of U.S. restaurants and stores such as Jamba Juice, Babies “R” Us, and Fuddruckers.
The application also help users make purchases online when you are using Chrome as browser or are initiating some in-app transactions. At the checkout stage, Android Pay auto-fills the payment and address information, which allows users to skip the tiresome process of manually filling in the information, completely. With the perks that Android Pay comes with, make it one of the best mobile payment apps for business.
PayPal
Making mobile payments using PayPal is one of the easiest and most convenient modes of transactions. The users only need to link the PayPal account with phone, set a PIN and go ahead with completing the checkout process at an accepted payment terminal.
PayPal makes transactions safer by giving the merchants payment and not card detail or other bank information. The popularity that comes attached with the application has gained it over 227 million active users.
Smartphone Apps Used For Making Peer to peer Payments
Venmo
Venmo is a free of charge money-transfer application introduces by PayPal, which allows the users to securely and quickly request or send money among family and friends only with a touch on their mobile app. The application is available in both iOS and in a wallet app for Android version.It needs you to create an account via Facebook or email. Once you are set up, all you have to do is link and then verify the bank account details including the debit and credit card info and you’ll be ready to begin. Money can be transferred from your Venmo to the bank account within 24 hours.
Google Wallet
Available for download on both iOS and Android devices, The app enables users to send, ask for, and then receive the payments from people they know. Operative primarily in the United States, it is prerequisite for the users to have the phone number and email address of their peers whom they are sending or asking money from. All the transfers are done through the debit card information that is registered on the app. Google Wallet charges no fees for money transfer.
Cryptocurrency Wallet Apps for Smartphones
Jaxx
Jaxx is one of the renowned blockchain digital wallets that make it easy, safe, and convenient to carry your cryptocurrencies around.
The app comes in all – Android, iOS, and Desktop versions. It utilizes a mnemonic seed for backing up the wallet or for transferring it to another device. The app enables you to scan the QR code, get funds, view the crypto holdings, among a number of other services, all within the scope of a single intuitive app.It comes with a number of advanced features as well, like multiple platforms wallet linkage and shapeshift integration. These features make the app an ideal wallet for the technology savvy group of users.The only shortcoming with this one crypto wallet app is – it comes with quite a steep learning graph, and the features may or may not work equally well with every single one of the new integrations. But in some more time and with some tweaks, the app will establish itself as a reliable solution.
Bitcoin Wallet App by Coinbase
The Bitcoin Wallet app is one popular app, which enables you to manage your personally held Bitcoins. The app is backed by crypto brains at Coinbase – a name that attaches automatic trust with Bitcoin Wallet. Using the application, one can easily sell, buy, and even spend their Bitcoins, all the while managing their crpto account.
One can think of The Bitcoin Wallet app as the PayPal app, but only for Bitcoins. Using it, users can even request and send Bitcoins to other people. The safety feature that it comes attached with, allows its users to remotely disable the access to their phone in case the device is stolen or lost. The user interface that the app comes with is pretty good with a lot of Google Material Design beauty.
Artificial Intelligence is continuing to be a buzzword in the market. Everyone is discussing over virtual assistants, chatbots and self-driving cars, and are putting their ideas and thoughts around it. It has become one of the highest searched topics on the Internet, with the involvement of various reputed entities across the globe investing their time, efforts and money into the technology. According to the latest report, Alphabet put around $30 billion for unleashing AI technology, while Baidu has invested nearly $20 billion in the technology last year. Not just this, the China government is also focusing on AI development with the perspective of controlling the future cornerstone innovation. With all these things into consideration, it can be easily said that the business world is progressively turning towards Artificial Intelligence, and we will see various significant changes in the industrial world in 2018. While AI is bringing the next revolution in various business verticals, including healthcare, finance, education and travel, the most significant change is in the mobile economy. The technology is disrupting the mobile app industry, paving a new way to meet the users’ expectation and reap the benefits of app development.
Curious to know how will AI transform the mobile market?
Here are the 7 ways AI is Reforming the Mobile App Industry in Terms of User Engagement and Developer App Revenue
1. Better Conversational Experience
Artificial Intelligence is filling the gap between the consumers and brands. The technology, in the form of Chatbots, is offering exceptional conversational experience to the customers. It is not only managing multiple clients at a time but is also proving to be the right solution for satisfying their needs with personalized products/services. According to a survey, 95% of smartphone users feel that customer service has been improved with the inception of chatbots. Another survey revealed that 15% of users have communicated with a bot in the past 12 months, while 35% of customers wish to see more companies investing in chatbot development. In addition to these, it has been expected that 80% of businesses will employ bots by 2020.
This clearly defines that AI/Chatbots are here to stay for a long, and disrupt the market in a positive way.
2. App Personalization
By integrating AI into their mobile apps, developers and brands are able to facilitate personalized experience to their users.
Apps will trace the user’s location and provide location-based results automatically; the user need not enter the location every time. Secondly, the technology will let the brands gather in-detailed information about customers via different means, such as online traffic, mobile devices, PoS machines, etc. The collected data along with the recorded user behavior will be further used to provide personalized results. This will improve the user retention rates. Besides, the mobile applications will let the user enjoy exceptional services without making many efforts. For example, Starbucks AI-powered app, My Starbucks Barista allow customers to place an order by just speaking the product they want.
On a larger scale, AI will revamp the search algorithm, shifting focus to richer contextual and personalized app experience.
3. Seamless Search Experience
AI is streamlining the user experience by empowering them to make their searches not only via text but also through images and voice. In fact, the technology is also enabling them to make searches in their natural language. This has taken the mobile app experience to the next level, by making it necessary for the app developers to integrate image recognition, voice recognition, and app localization features into their mobile apps.
4. Onboard Experience and Gamification
Nearly 25% of app users never return to the app after the first try. To minimize these numbers, app developers are turning towards AI. The technological effort understands human psychology and enables the UI/UX designers to design accordingly. It prevents users from memorizing all the details by securely storing with it, which indicates AI is enhancing the app usability. Besides, it let the users have access to various in-app gestures, which turns their app experience to be more enticing.
5. Improved App Security
AI technology will cater the biggest concern of mobile app developers, i.e, security. With parallel technologies like Predictive Analysis and Machine learning, the technology will help in making predictions related to app security and vulnerability levels. The technology will keep an eye on the user behavior pattern and alert is anything suspicious is found. Not only this, the technology will also recommend or implement changes to improve the security of the app. It will also introduce new ways of logging into/out of the mobile application.
In addition to evaluating and implementing improvements in the security mechanism, the Artificial Intelligence technology will also let the app developers find potential security “holes” and “backdoors”, reducing the risk of intruder attack by employing these security leakage points.
6. Enhanced App Marketing
Not only the app development and engagement, the Artificial Intelligence will also refine the app marketing scenario. The AI-enabled machines and apps study the market trends and user behavioral pattern to provide real-time, detailed demographics. By this, these machines and apps not only cut down the efforts of marketers in gathering data but also reduces the chances of an error. By serving with real-time data, the technology enables the marketers to make marketing strategies with a futuristic approach. This improves the conversion rates and sales.
According to a Gartner Research, 30% of companies will employ AI for sales by 2020, which defines investing in AI to be the need of the hour.
7. AI and IoT
AI is also playing a pivotal role in the growth of IoT. The technology enables the connected devices to collect real-time data and take a decision on their own. In other words, AI-powered mobile apps empower connected devices to learn from the information exchange pattern and act accordingly.
According to statistics, there will be more than 50 billion connected devices by the year 2020, which means a higher demand for AI apps to control these devices.
Artificial Intelligence technology is slowly and gradually revamping the mobile economy with its potential to collect real-time data, understand human emotions and provide a personalized experience. And now, with the announcement of AI chips in the 5G smartphones, the future of the mobile economy is going to be more intelligent and interesting.
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