Our Mobile App Development Process: Step Five

Review and Adjustment of Mobile Apps for Municipalities and Local Governments

Step five in our mobile app development process is an exciting one. At this point in the process, you’ll get to see a test version of your mobile app and try it out, just like one of your users would.

What Happens During the Review and Adjustment Step?

If you and your team are on top of things, everyone should already have their App Center accounts created and their devices registered.

The Info Grove team will send you an email with a link you’ll use to download your test app. The process for downloading and installing is very similar to what you are used to when downloading an app from the App Store or Google Play store.

An Important Reminder

Registering the specific device each person plans to use to review the test app is important. The test app will only work on the registered devices. Since you’ll want to review the app on both iOS (Apple) and Android versions, make sure your team has at least one of each registered for the review step.

Time to Check Our Your App

Once you’ve downloaded your test app, it’s time to review and provide feedback on what you see. Keep in mind, while this is a test app, it’s essentially exactly what an end user will see when they download your app and use it, so put yourself in the user’s shoes as you’re trying things out.

What Should We Look For?

• Review your branding. Are your logos showing up correctly and where you expected them to? Are the colours aligned with your brand? Are other brand guidelines being maintained throughout the app. Make sure any taglines are correct.
• Review the content. Is all the content you wanted to include showing up where and how you expected it to? Is content linking up how it should? For example, if you included a feature that showcases all of the available public pools in your town, is the right content being pulled in? Is an image of the pool, the pool’s location on the map, its hours, and other relevant details you wanted to include displaying correctly?
• Note any technical issues. Of course, our Info Grove team tests your mobile app as much as possible before we share it with you. But the amount of data housed within the app means that it’s impossible for our team to test every single possible combination of potential requests. So, if you happen to notice something funny or something that doesn’t work, let us know.

How Can I Make Sure This Process Goes Smoothly?

The overall objective for this phase is for you, your team and any relevant stakeholders to review the app and ensure that everything you shared with our team is showing up on the app the way you envisioned.
While we always expect some going back and forth during this stage, if you can ensure everyone who needs to weigh in does so as early in the process as possible, the easier the process is and the less back and forth we’ll need to do.

Consolidate feedback from everyone on your team and make sure it all aligns. This is as conflicting feedback can be confusing and may result in wasted time or unnecessary changes or adjustments.

Why Is This Step Important?

After this stage, what is in your test app is what will become the final app that is released in the stores for your users to download. So, it’s important to make sure you like what you see.

While content changes can happen later and be reflected immediately, the design of the app–colours, logo appearances, layouts, etc. will be hardcoded and cannot be changed once the app is submitted to the store for release. Pay extra attention to the branding and design elements of your mobile app when reviewing and providing feedback.

Once we’ve received your feedback, our team will make the necessary updates and changes. Hopefully after not too much back and forth, you’ll be ready to sign off on the final version of the app that we’ll release to the store.

Info Grove follows a streamlined 8-step mobile app development process that allows us to go from concept to deployment in as few as six weeks. You can learn more about the process here.

Karim Mansour is an Inside Sales Representative at 14 Oranges, the creators of the Info Grove platform.