Web App Design Preocess Steps

Try to seek companies that treat you as a partner, not just a customer: the best development vendors can provide market insights and valuable feedback regarding your product.

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How to build a web app? Key steps

Once you have decided whether you want to hire new team members or deliver this project with an outsourced web development team, it's time to start shaping your product. The process recommended by us starts with drafting the foundations: determining your business goal and outlining the main deliverables.

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Step 1: Conceptualizing the product

This is an opportunity to organize ideas and clarify your product vision. The main questions you should be asking here are:

What do you want to build?
What is the audience of your product?
Why would these people use your product?
What is the goal you want to achieve by building this product?

Approaching product development with answers to these questions is very helpful. Even if your initial idea was somewhat vague, for instance, building "the next Uber" or "Tinder for clothes", now you have more details about your future product.

How can you organize your ideas at this stage of product development? Here at Apptension, when working with clients who try to refine their product vision, we usually rely on mind maps or apps like Milanote.

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Step 2: Project kickoff

Before your team starts working on bringing your idea to life, it's essential to organize a project kick-off meeting. During this meeting (it could be a video call), every team member should get a chance to meet people involved in the project (other team members, stakeholders) and learn about their roles in the project.

It's essential when working with an external team, but also useful for your in-house web development projects—you'll make sure everyone is on the same page. The kick-off call is also a chance to get everyone up to speed regarding the tools that will be used throughout the project (our basic stack consists of Slack, Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, Figma), main communication rules, and the schedule of meetings.‍
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Step 3: Discovery Phase

The kick-off meeting could be followed by a discovery phase—we always recommend it to our clients. The discovery phase is the period during which you and your team can:

Verify the feasibility of the initial vision by building software prototypes.
Test different technologies and tools.
Define the Minimum Valuable Product (MVP).
Design the infrastructure and plan the deployments of your product.
Uncover the in-depth needs, wants, and pains of your target audience.

A discovery phase helps to reduce many web development-related risks, as you get to try out different scenarios and pick the optimal one. At the end of this period, you should have a full project backlog—a prioritized list of tasks your team will work on during the project lifecycle.

Dedicating some time to get this groundwork done will pay off: working with a defined and tested set of requirements will be more productive and effective.

Step 4: Wireframes & Designs

Product design is a crucial step in the web development process. As a consumer, you often see colorful interfaces that catch your attention, but the most successful designs have very humble beginnings—wireframes.

Starting with low-fidelity wireframes or mockups is an efficient way to verify whether your ideas resonate with the end-users, and the web app is intuitive to use. If you're working with an external team, the wireframing stage is also an opportunity to double-check if their work is aligned with your vision.

Tools that allow for sharing and providing feedback on designs will make the collaboration easier and simplify the programmers' job later on. Adobe XD and Figma are our apps of choice.
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Step 5: Development

The process of software development can be supported by a framework suited to your needs. At Apptension, we follow agile frameworks, which are perfect for building web apps. Recently, we built also a SaaS Boilerplate to develop products faster and cheaper. The development team works in 2-week iterations, during which they deliver a planned increment.

One of the most significant advantages of the agile approach is that you can deliver value continuously and be flexible when it comes to your project's scope. Change of requirements? No problem, you can accommodate it in the next iteration. On top of that, the whole process is very transparent.

Don't forget about the following elements of a successful web development process:

Quality Assurance - In order for your product to be of excellent quality, you should include a QA specialist in your team and test each product increment. Effective quality assurance is not a "testing stage" somewhere at the end of the software development process, but rather a continuous process integrated with the development efforts.

Release preparation - Naturally, you want to launch your product smoothly and plan for a positive reception from the users—an influx of traffic. Before you deploy your web app, you should make sure that the product works as planned and run load tests on the environments to test its reaction to the traffic.

Step 6: Post Launch Support

The web development process is not over after the big launch. You need to have your team ready to:

fix bugs,
introduce changes based on customer feedback,
optimize the performance of your product,
renew licenses,
add new features according to the product roadmap.

This part of the process can also be done in an agile way.

We hope that this guide helped you to better understand the steps needed to build a web application. Feel free to use our recommendations to build your own product, and definitely let us know how it turns out. Good luck!
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