You’re a Mobile Application consultant. How can you make sure your clients understand your work?

Understanding the client's goals, needs, and expectations is crucial for a successful project. By identifying the problem they're trying to solve, defining their target users, determining essential features, and establishing metrics for success, you can tailor your approach to align with their technical knowledge and business objectives effectively. This approach ensures that the final product meets their requirements and delivers value to their intended audience.

As a Mobile Application consultant, making sure clients understand your work is super important. First off, you need to talk to your clients in a way that makes sense to them. Keep it simple and use examples they can relate to. Show them pictures, diagrams, or models to help them understand better. Keep your clients updated on what's happening regularly. Tell them about any big achievements, any problems you've run into, and what you're planning to do next. Additionally, give them demonstrations or let them try out the app themselves. Give them documents that explain everything about your work in detail. Ask your clients for feedback along the way. Listen to what they have to say and use their feedback to make your work even better.

My experience is clients wanting a mobile app often don't know why. They feel it is important because thought leaders tell them so. This makes it hard for executives to be aligned with the end result. Too many goals leads to an app becoming a "jack of all trades" and not doing anything really well. It is important to remember that a mobile app is normally for customers of the client. Only rarely for internal use. The big question is "what do customers want" I like to ask my client to describe the customers primary goal for using the app. How does it make their lives easier? Then run a survey and ask their customers to rate that goal on a scale of 1-10. Anything less than an average of eight means they are focussing on the wrong thing.

Defining the scope of work clearly is essential to prevent confusion and conflicts during mobile app development. It's crucial to document aspects such as the app's purpose, features, design, platform, testing, deployment, maintenance, and costs in a contract or proposal. Additionally, specifying roles and responsibilities, communication channels, frequency, and the change management process helps ensure alignment between both parties and minimizes the risk of scope creep. This comprehensive approach sets clear expectations and facilitates a smooth development process.

Once you have apps primary goal then everything centres around that. Defining the customer experience (CX) on the various device types is the most important aspect? This can be very complicated and tedious if the information is business domain specific. Most clients do not understand this and are not prepared for how long this can take. The remainder of the project becomes a standard development process with some extra considerations e.g. online/offline, battery life etc. Often overlooked is how long it takes an app to be published to the app stores. Quick if accepted as-is but any sensitive data, financial markets, gambling etc are bound to take longer. It is essential to communicate and manage all these expectations before starting.

Visuals and prototypes are very important. Personally I think they are often done too soon in the process. And often for only one device layout e.g. phone portrait. They are like eye candy and customer stakeholders quickly get excited about them, forgetting the main objective. The rest of the app is then shoe-horned into place and is never 100% right. For me the key is "what is the fundamental workflow" that is required to provide the app's main goal. This does not require high fidelity mock-ups. Just block diagrams or wireframes to show how the user interacts with the app. Once this has been nailed down, then all supporting screens fall naturally into place. High fidelity mock-ups and bespoke look and feel can be done from there.

Education is the most important part of any mobile app development process. The software company often sells the "dream" but conveniently leaves out the pitfalls. This is understandable but it invariably leads to mismatched expectations. The software supplier needs to be trusted technical partner to the client. The supplier must focus on the client's end goal of the app. Then use their experience and expertise to inform the client that everything is a trade-off. Support and nourish the dream but gently point out the pitfalls associated with each feature. Having a load of links and case studies is great but I prefer to tailor this content specifically to the client's app and features. Make it easy for them to digest and understand.