The success of your app is directly proportional to its quality. If a user’s initial experience is positive, then they’ll want to use the app again. Here are a few major points that if taken care of can help your app stand out from the crowd:

Visual Design and User Interaction

Few key areas that your app must have:

• Alignment of buttons, labels, text etc.
• Color combination used in header, footer, various elements, links etc.: Color combination can be used to focus user’s attention to important or actionable elements. Make sure not to highlight too many elements otherwise important elements might lose focus.
• Spelling: Ensure that your app does not have any spelling mistakes. This is something that can also adversely affect your search ranking. Spelling and grammar play an important role in the evaluation of the quality of a site and its content.
• Auto Focus on Input: This will speed up things because the user does not have to click on individual input fields to type. This may be implemented in input submission, search forms etc.

Speed

Does your app load quickly? Everybody expects a fast web experience. A fast site increases the overall quality of the app and increases user satisfaction.

Courtesy: www.techcrunch.com

A major reason that can severely affect the performance of your app is:

• Size of individual files and images: Huge files and high-resolution images can take double the time to load and can drastically affect the performance of the app. Ensure that your high-resolution images are first compressed using default compressor and re-load these compressed images instead of uncompressed ones.

Scalability

Ask yourself following questions

• How many visitors are accessing my app every day?
• What is the peak number of visits that my app can support?
• What areas of my app are most accessed by visitors?
• What is the average response time of most popular pages of my app?
• How efficiently can my hardware/software support the current volume of visitors?
• How much infrastructure (hardware/software requirements) is required to handle these volumes?

Slow apps will frustrate the customer tempting them to leave soon.

Standards

Is your app built on provided standards? You have to understand who would be using your app. Identify their key tasks and key priorities that they want to accomplish through your site. Find out their goals and focus on how it relates to your business’ goals. Interacting with end users by conducting Surveys, User Testing sessions etc. can help you understand how closely user’s needs have been met by the app.

Also, your app must be built on a platform that is supported by standard skill sets across the organization and in the public domain. It must be flexible enough that is capable of integrating various systems for development and also the common set of functions and features must be sharable by different applications.

Security

Since mobile apps are running outside the security of your internal networks, you always have to make sure that the app is not vulnerable to security threats. One basic thing you can do is to encrypt traffic to the backend—at a minimum, by using Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption. However, SSL by itself isn’t enough because of the nature of how mobile devices connect. One solution would be to rely on WebKit to handle SSL.

– Susan B. John