The business analysis stage helps us specify the app’s features and requirements.

Mad Devs has a clear-cut strategy for developing mobile applications for our customers. Performing a business analysis is step number one here.

The importance of the business analysis stage in mobile app development

Business analysis lays the foundation for the success of the mobile app’s launch. This process allows the development team to look deep into the customer’s requirements, market needs, and end-users’ desires. Once all of the above are determined, there is a much higher chance of creating a winning product. At Mad Devs, we perform a business analysis to:

Build a product roadmap
Decide on an MVP
Create user personas
Specify app metrics
Map out a user journey

Now, let’s cover each point more thoroughly.

Building a roadmap

A product roadmap is geared towards answering big questions about your future mobile app, such as: Why develop the app? What problems will it solve? Who will use the app? What basic features should it have? In our roadmap, we shape the vision of the product that is shared among the developers, managers, stakeholders, users, and other parties involved. Moreover, the roadmap contains a strategic plan to achieve the desired result, including the time and effort needed.

Determining an MVP

Developing an MVP (minimum viable product) gives a great opportunity to test your mobile app with early adopters, get valuable feedback, and improve the app in a timely manner and at a low cost. A minimum viable product can tell you whether you’re moving in the right direction and help secure support from investors. For an MVP, we determine the core functionality and after analyzing the reviews, we either add or remove features in the next iterations of the app to fully satisfy user needs.

Creating user personas

User personas portray potential users of your product. These are detailed descriptions of the consumers that may include their demographics, professions, hobbies, interests, buying habits, and other information. Once you know the app’s users very well, you can find the best way to help them out. Based on careful research, we create user personas to define the target audience, identify their pain points, and prioritize the app features.

Defining app performance metrics

In addition to determining the core functions of the app, we also need to make sure it is successful in fulfilling them. For this purpose, we work out the key metrics to measure the performance of the application. Depending on the app’s functionality, we decide what metrics will be used to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your product. These metrics may comprise average response time, throughput, CPU usage, and others.

Mapping out a user journey

Finally, we create a detailed user journey map to visualize how the target audience will communicate with the app. A user journey map describes the step-by-step interaction of the users with your product. By mapping out user journeys, we can analyze the consumers’ behaviour and thus improve the usability, functionality, security, and other characteristics of the app. As a result, you can increase your conversion and retention rates.

At Mad Devs, the mobile app development process starts with the business analysis stage, which contains several essential preparation steps for the project. The deliverables of this stage are a product roadmap, an MVP template, user personas, app performance metrics, and a user journey map. At this point, the team is ready to focus on the UI/UX design of the future application.

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