The digital landscape has shifted tremendously in the last decade. Back then, the question your ministry had to answer was simply, “Do we need a digital app, or will a mobile-friendly website suffice?” But nowadays, a mobile-friendly website is the baseline—it’s assumed your website will work on screens of all sizes.
Since a mobile-friendly site is now a given, the question isn’t, “does my ministry need an app?” The question for many has become, “how do I build an app for my ministry?” And not just any app, but an app that will serve the true needs of your constituents and further your mission.
5 Proven Steps to Create a Successful App
As development professionals, we know how to build an app. Digital agencies like Agathon generally agree on the steps necessary to create an effective final product.
But ministries like yours? You may not always be familiar with the process, which is completely understandable. It’s not your area of expertise.
Here, we’ll detail the five steps of digital app development to demystify the experience of getting an app live—and how Agathon can help.
Step 1: Conduct User Research to Understand Your Constituents
The first step of building an app—user research—has nothing to do with the dev side of building. What it does do is build empathy. When done right, user research encourages your team to understand and consider the wants, needs, and pain points of your constituents.
It’s easy to get caught up in your own excitement or in pleasing internal stakeholders during a build. But internal opinions about what your app should or shouldn’t include don’t always align with end users’ real needs. Consequently, conducting user research, and allowing its results to inform app development, is the only way to ensure you’re creating a platform your users actually want and will use.
User Research Methods for Ministries
There are many options when it comes to conducting user research. Perhaps the most accessible option is market analysis. Anyone can purchase reports from research centers like Gartner or Pew, then comb through the data to extract relevant information.
Market analysis is helpful for understanding your ministry’s larger landscape, but it’s not incredibly specific or insightful. That’s why the best kind of user research involves direct interaction with users.
This research could take the form of:
- Interviews,
- Focus groups, or
- Direct observations.
Imagine giving representative end users a task to complete within a beta version of your ministry’s app and watching them move through the steps to do that task. You’d glean so much valuable information observing their victories—but also their sticking points—operating your platform. Leverage this information to tailor your app to users’ needs and it’s sure to be a success.
Typically, user research is completed upfront. That’s why we listed it as step one. But keep in mind that user research can be conducted during discovery and building (the following steps) as well. The more user feedback you gather, the better!
Step 2: Complete Discovery to Solidify Your App’s Scope
Another foundational step of the app development process is discovery. Discovery gets the right stakeholders in the room to figure out exactly what needs to be done to create your app and how to go about doing it.
There are two main benefits to the discovery phase:
- It ensures the most accurate scope and budget possible for your project, and
- It builds team-wide consensus around your app, charting the straightest path from an initial idea to a user-centered concept.
Facilitate a Discovery Workshop
It’s important to note that having an outside partner spearhead your discovery workshop tends to lead to the best, most unbiased results—and consequently the best app.
There are five steps to Agathon’s discovery process, refined from industry best practices to meet the specific needs of ministries:
- Framing: figuring out what needs to be accomplished
- Empathy: elevating the user’s perspective
- Journey: pinpointing the user’s journey with your app, including problem areas, by creating a journey map
- Exploration: brainstorming how to facilitate each step on the journey map
- Product backbone: developing an actionable features list to be executed during the building phase
Steps 3 and 4: Build, Test, and Refine Your App
The next two steps—building and user testing—go hand-in-hand. In fact, you’ll toggle back and forth between them as you finalize your product, which is why we’ve lumped them together here.
Building your app starts with foundational work. Think of it like building a literal foundation for a house. You have to prepare the land before you pour the concrete. How? Build out specific features or key moments of the user experience a little at a time.
The All-Important Build-and-Test Cycle
Once you have a feature “drafted” (finished enough to show users but not perfectly polished), it’s time for step four: user testing.
Allow users to try out the feature. “Users” ideally refers to the people who will actually use your final product. At Agathon we also test with our team and our client’s team. See where your test groups get held up, or what they gravitate toward. Take that feedback and let it color how you complete the feature when you return to the “build” step. It’s a basic—but vital—feedback loop. Build, test, and repeat until you have a full set of user-validated features that make up your ministry’s app.
Creating apps in this way (with a feedback loop) ensures you’re constantly on track to build a user-friendly app. The alternative is building the app in one fell swoop and crossing your fingers it doesn’t flop when it finally gets into users’ hands. There’s simply no reason to take that risk.
Step 5: Launch Your Ministry’s App with Confidence
If you’ve carefully carried out steps one through four, the last step—launching your ministry’s app—won’t be intimidating. You’ll know your constituents will enjoy your product because you spent the necessary time asking them for their opinions as it was planned and built.
As mentioned, not everyone’s a developer. These app creation steps are obvious to us and others in the industry because it’s a time-tested development approach. At Agathon, not only are we developers, we’re developers just for ministries like yours. We share your commitment to faith-fueled digital products. If you need a guide through this process, we’re here to help.