Through this article, the basics of business analysis will be explained, common misconceptions debunked, and the advantages of hiring a business analyst discussed.

What is Business Analysis?

Business analysis is an integral part of mobile app development, as it helps to bridge the gap between technical departments and clients. This process includes activities that help to identify, validate, and address business needs, requirements, problems, and solutions. Business analysts serve as mediators between stakeholders and technical teams, ensuring that diverse perspectives are taken into account to create a cohesive project vision. They are involved in the development process from start to finish, providing helpful input throughout.

What are the purposes of business analysis?

1. Identify areas of improvement: Business analysis helps identify areas of business operations that could benefit from improved processes, technology, or organizational alignment.

2. Enhance efficiency: Business analysis helps identify and eliminate inefficiencies, such as unnecessary steps or processes, that may be reducing productivity.

3. Reduce costs: Business analysis can also be used to identify cost-saving opportunities, such as streamlining processes, improving technology, or reducing personnel.

4. Increase profitability: Business analysis is used to identify and capitalize on profitable opportunities, such as expanding into new markets, launching new products, or finding new customers.

5. Improve customer service: Business analysis can be used to identify customer needs and develop strategies to meet those needs, resulting in improved customer service.

6. Support decision-making: Business analysis provides the data and insights needed to make informed decisions about how to move the business forward.
Why Business Analysis Matters in Mobile App Development

According to a McKinsey report, 17% of IT projects fail catastrophically, with projects running 7% behind schedule and 45% over budget on average. The failure rate for consumer mobile apps is particularly shocking, with an average success rate of 0.05%.

Despite these discouraging figures, business owners can use business analysis for mobile applications to make their projects successful. By taking the right steps, they can turn the odds in their favor.

Relevance of the App Market

Market research is critical to the app development process and is used to figure out the best way to position an app into the market and verify its market potential. In today’s competitive market, business owners may spend months analyzing the features and unique selling points of their competitors.

Business analysts are then responsible for performing extensive market research in order to answer certain questions. These questions include what the target audience is, who the competitors are, what the app’s strengths and weaknesses are, and whether the app’s goal aligns with user needs.

By researching the market in this way, app owners can create a detailed and data-driven concept for their app, which can then be used to decide which core features should be included in a minimum viable product (MVP) that is adapted to meet market trends and user needs.

Accurate Requirements Elicitation

The Project Management Institute reports that businesses that prioritize requirements management have a success rate of 65% for meeting their original goal and business intent. By contrast, projects with vague and volatile requirements only succeed 46% of the time.

Business analysts play a critical role in gathering and documenting user stories to meet the project’s needs. By understanding the desired business objectives, analysts can create comprehensive user stories that inform development and testing. This ensures the resulting functional and non-functional requirements are in alignment with the business’s needs and expectations. By doing so, business analysts provide essential support for designing and developing mobile apps that meet the desired objectives.

Measuring App Performance

When thinking about app performance, the number of downloads may come to mind first. However, this number may not be completely accurate since some users may delete an app shortly after downloading it. As such, business analysts have a variety of metrics they can leverage to evaluate an app’s success.

These metrics will be chosen based on the app’s unique needs and objectives, and can be used to refine an effective marketing strategy. Examples of these metrics include the number of downloads, app store rating, user engagement rate, and lifetime value. Additionally, churn rate, conversion rate, cost per acquisition, in-app purchases, and quality of user experience should all be monitored.

By monitoring these metrics and adjusting accordingly, you can maximize the success of your app and drive the desired results.

Reduced Software Development Costs

Recent industry research has shown that the average software product has 80% of its functionality rarely or never used, with only 12% being used on a daily basis. Companies often invest in unnecessary features that do not generate any revenue, an issue that arises from a lack of business analysis or incorrect requirements.

By using prioritization techniques such as story mapping, business analysts are able to identify features that provide the most value to users. This helps to avoid expensive redevelopment in the future and reduces the cost of development, maintenance and support.

Balanced Team Workload

Having a business analyst on the team can be beneficial, as it helps to distribute work evenly among team members. This prevents any single team member from having to take on multiple roles, which can lead to inadequate analysis or inaccurate requirements definition. With both a project manager and a business analyst on board, the project manager can focus on overseeing the app development process, while the business analyst can strategically ensure that the project meets the needs of the business.

Enhanced Communication

Having a business analyst involved can also increase the speed of communication. They can be used as a liaison between different teams, ensuring that information is exchanged faster and more accurately. Business analysis can also help identify potential problems early on, helping to reduce the risk of miscommunication. By using techniques such as process mapping, they can identify areas in which communication can be improved and introduce new ways of working to increase efficiency.

Conclusion

If you want to increase the success rate of your project, enlist the help of our experienced business analysis professionals. At Orangesoft, we have a team of experts who will ensure that your mobile applications are user-friendly and aligned with your business objectives. Our business analysts will make sure that you and your developers are communicating effectively, and they will put together the requirements and documentation needed for your project. Get in touch with us and let’s work together to make great things happen!

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Here’s what you need to know about web development:

Basic Web programming languages. HTML, CSS and JavaScript are the building blocks of any website.

HTML defines the basic structure of a web page, and CSS defines how that structure should look in a web browser. JavaScript provides users with interactivity.

Even if you don’t know these basic languages in detail, you better understand how they work together and how basic changes are made to client sites. It will help to be bolder in offering solutions and bounce back from developers’ initial questions.

Frontend development frameworks. Frameworks like Bootstrap or Genesis (for WordPress designers) contain an arsenal of HTML, CSS and JavaScript components. You can put them together and greatly speed up the web development process, as well as ensure consistency and quality of projects.

WordPress Themes. Themes take control over the composition and appearance of a site on WordPress. WordPress now runs about 35% of the sites on the web, so it’s helpful to learn how to create and update WordPress themes.

Site Development. After you complete a project and your client is happy, every client usually wants you to continue to develop their new site.

Tilda, Webflow, Readymag, and GoDaddy Pro builders are just the way to go.

What skills you need to work as a freelancer

As a freelance web designer, you’ll use a variety of skills in your day-to-day responsibilities.
In addition to managing production work, you’ll also be responsible for project management, marketing, accounting, sales, and more.
In fact, you’ll probably find that you end up spending just as much (if not more) time managing your business as you do creating websites for clients.
These business skills aren’t something you’ll learn in an online course — most of them are based on experiences and lessons learned as you grow your freelance web design company.

But you can learn the basics of running a sustainable and profitable freelance web design business.

Let’s look at some key business skills and tools you need to learn.

Customer Service and Project Management.
Once you get a decent number of clients, you’ll notice that you no longer remember who and what you promised. This is where new tools come to the rescue.

For freelance web designers, project management and client work tend to overlap.

Project management is aimed at improving project quality, optimizing design processes and reducing the burden on themselves.

Client work is designed to help make your clients feel a tangible effect when working with you, and it’s also the kind of competent client management that helps you meet (and even anticipate) their expectations.

It’s important for you to learn how to manage deadlines, client immersion appointments, and your workflow so that your web design business thrives.

Here’s what you need to know about client and project management:

Project management and planning. A clear plan and its implementation is the key to a successful web design project.

Start applying standard project management procedures, and use project management tools like Basecamp, Asana or Trello to stick to your plan when working with clients.

Work with clients. Even if you only have a few clients at a time, a customer relationship management (CRM) system will take care of building relationships with them. With CRM, you’ll always know the best things to do now to increase your customer flow (e.g. work with current customers and find outlets for new ones).

Copper, Streak, Pipedrive are great easy and inexpensive options.

Customer Onboarding. Tools like Typeform (to collect data) and Zapier (to automate the process itself) can help you here.

Time management. When you’re responsible for managing your time effectively, you need to make the most of every hour. Timekeeping tools like Harvest, Toggl, and Timely make it easy to keep track of what projects you’re working on, when, and which projects are most profitable.

Finance and billing. After all, you deserve to be paid on time for your work. Tools like Bonsai and FreshBooks are designed to help freelancers keep track of their business finances and make it easy for clients to pay their bills.

If you hate managing money, you may end up switching to an off-the-shelf accounting service like Bench.

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Understanding the principles of internet marketing, complete with practice, will help you attract more leads and increase sales for both you and your clients. A large flow of customers will encourage you to reconsider the prices of your services.

Here’s what you should know:

Social media marketing. Social media is the fastest way to find clients for web design.

A well-established content strategy will help you grow your social media community, and to keep it from becoming a chore, try Buffer or Edgar at work. They have good post planners that will tell you what to post and when to post it.

And services like Canva will help you assemble cool graphics for your posts in no time.

Buffer might come in handy one day for automating your social media marketing. Buffer
Search Engine Optimization. Create yourself a website, pick up search terms and start creating useful content on your blog. This strategy helps you find additional customers.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a big topic and we’ll cover it in the next article

And if you have WordPress, a plugin like Yoast can already help with basic opimization.

Communication
Last but not least, it’s important to keep open channels of communication with your customers.

Make sure clients are aware of the status of projects, you remember to collect feedback and improve your work processes.

The secret to good customer service is clear boundaries. So the better you know your business, the more precisely you can negotiate key points back on shore.

Here are a few tools to help you manage your communication with clients:

Messenger. Slack or Telegram, for example, are fine for communicating with clients. But they can be very clingy for newbies, because newbies think that they have to instantly respond to everyone and end up losing their rhythm.

Email. Tie your email address to your site’s domain, it’ll give you a bit of status. Plus your address will be easier to remember and contact ([email protected] instead of [email protected]).

Meetings. Live meetings can be held after major resource updates or in the initial phases when you need to establish contact and trust with the client.

It may be convenient to communicate online through Zoom. The video format is more convenient than just a voice. There’s more of a presence and engagement effect.

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Typography as a visual medium

You can use fonts to create entire designs. In addition, you can also build on the fonts you choose to use in your design. To improve typography in your design, go back to basics.

First, increase your vocabulary with special terms. Figure out what tracking, kerning, and liding are. A Beautifully Illustrated Glossary Of Typographic Terms You Should Know is a great visual resource for learning these terms.

Next, if you want a solid understanding of how to apply typography to the Web, read Web Typography: The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web.

The combination of fonts can make or break a design

Finally, learn how to mix and match fonts. FontWolf and FontPair are great resources for this. Being able to combine fonts correctly will greatly increase the dynamism of your design.

If you’re interested in learning more about typography, you can read my article: Typography can make your design… Or break it.

Rule #2: Use space to create balance.
Space helps achieve vertical and horizontal balance in a design. Space is simply necessary to create a visual hierarchy and to form connections between elements.

Work on balance and visual harmony

You can always turn to sites like Behance and Dribbble: there you’ll find plenty of inspiring examples of how to work with space. But it’s also important to develop your own “spatial” intuition – it comes in handy for creating balance and visual harmony.

As you study typography, you’ve probably noticed how important space is in fonts. Setting up the kerning and liding is a great exercise to get your hand in working with space. That’s why I recommend playing KernType, a game in which you compare your version of kerning to the version suggested by a professional.

Another skill-building exercise: take an existing design, draw the x- and y-axes, simplify the design to basic shapes and analyze the balance, and then repackage the elements. Pay particular attention to how negative space affects the balance of elements.

Rule #3 Use size to create a visual hierarchy
When it comes to creating a visual hierarchy, there is nothing more important than size. By creating visual connections between elements through size, you set the direction of attention.

Grids are very useful when working with size.

When working with size, grids are a great helper. They help set the right size ratio to properly indicate the importance of each element.

Once you have sized an element, stick to it in all use scenarios. Consistency is a key aspect of design.

Use size to build a visual hierarchy

Here’s an exercise to get a handle on sizing.
It’s all about feedback.

Sketch out a sketch or a rendering of a branding. Because ask a friend to take a look at your design. Have him circle the elements that stand out. Then have him or her number the highlighted elements in order of importance, based on their visual weight. Does the result meet your expectations?

As you do this exercise, keep the following questions in mind:

What is the conversion goal of this page? How can you optimize the page to achieve that goal?
What is the relationship between the elements? Which elements do you want to make more meaningful?
Does the page’s leeway direct the user’s attention in the way you want it?

Rule #4: Use color to convey meaning
Color plays many roles. It carries meaning, creates emotional resonance, and brings unity to the design.

Color helps convey the idea behind a design

If you want to dive deeper into color theory, read my article Designing in Color. Here are a few key ideas from that article:

Before you start picking a palette, determine the purpose of your design. In a good design, the color palette is always consistent with the purpose.
Determine your audience. People perceive colors differently, and colors affect people differently: it all depends on their personal preferences, culture and upbringing, and life experiences.
The key to selecting the right color palette is simplicity. First, choose a neutral background color. Then choose accent colors: primary and secondary. Finally, based on the selected colors, determine the “color of error” and “color of successful operation” – they are useful for different states of the interface.
When you get a good understanding of color theory, you can start experimenting. Try to constantly step out of your comfort zone and try new color palettes.

Movies and different programs are an inexhaustible source of color inspiration. .

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User experience (UX) design is the science and art of creating products (or Web sites) that provide users with the best possible experience.

Many of the visual design elements we discussed above affect how a site is perceived by visitors, but UX design also includes how exactly products evoke certain feelings in visitors.

UX designers think less about the technology behind the site and more about user research and the relevance of the experience created to users’ needs. This sometimes requires extensive user research and an understanding of perceptual psychology and interaction design principles. If you’re looking for more practice on UX, check out our fresh review of 7 courses on UX and interface design.

It’s important for web designers to learn the basics of UX design and the basics of user interface design (UX / UI):

Personas and Jobs (JTBD). Creating generalized images of the target audience and their needs, helps ensure that each design solution will hit the customers (be useful and emotionally engaging).

User research (UX/CX-research). Hotjar helps well in this, with it you can study heat maps, conduct user surveys – everything you need to promptly understand the reasons for behavior and motivation of site visitors.

User experience testing. Testing a site on real users can help identify points where visitors get stuck or confused, as well as identify points to pump up design value.

Information architecture and navigation (IA). It’s not complicated if you approach it in a comprehensive way. Information architecture is a story about the arrangement of information on a site: what pages should be on the site, what items should be on the menu and in what order, what blocks must be on the page for users to find the answer. It can only be done well by applying SEO analysis and an interview with a subject matter expert (the customer or an engaged expert who knows well what the site is about). Without analysis of search queries (actual user interests) and matching them with practical expertise, the site will be toyed with rather than approximated by reality.

Wireframing. Just as you wouldn’t build a house without a plan, you shouldn’t build a website without blueprints and a plan.

Wireframing helps you decide on the key elements and composition of your site pages in close-up, without sketching out the smallest details, at a level that’s sufficient to assess “what will be there and how it will work”. Tools such as Balsamiq help sketch out site layouts quickly, try it.

Web design honed for conversions
Companies and clients won’t shell out thousands of dollars for a new website just because it’s pretty. They need top-notch design to produce results for business – in fact, 48% of people indicated that website design is the No. 1 factor in determining business credibility.

Web designers simply need to create sites that motivate visitors to take the action they want, from signing up for a mailing list to buying a product to providing their contact information.

This means that Web designers need to know how to design so that conversions – the number of visitors who take targeted actions on the site, such as subscribing to a mailing list, buying a product, or entering contact information for potential customers – grow.

It’s a complex skill, from copywriting attractive text to reducing the number of decisions visitors need to make.

Here are some web design skills and tools you should learn:

Website design and layout tools. For designers who care about creating beautiful and functional sites for clients without getting bogged down in programming, WordPress plugins like Divi or Beaver Builder can be a great option. Even if your programming experience is limited, you can still create beautiful sites. There are also good website builders such as Tilda, Readymag and Webflow.

Graphic design tools. You can quickly create a functional and beautiful website with a command in Figma and Sketch. And Photoshop is now back in the position for which it was born: developing unique (any in terms of expressiveness) brand graphics without creative constraints.

Tools for prototyping and creating design concepts. Ideal for working through design concepts and clarifying the vision of the project with all team members in every detail. If Figma and Photoshop hold you back, InVision Studio helps you bring everything to life in the smallest detail and with soft behavior and micro-animations.

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Creating websites may seem like something simple at first glance, but each unique design is nuanced.

For example, a website offering travel planning services for seniors will be very different from a blog aimed at children. Here’s an interesting example.

Each new project web designer examines the following questions:

Who is the site for? What audience are you trying to attract?
What information is needed to attract and convince potential customers?
What design elements will work together to convert the target audience?
How does the website work for an Internet marketing system, such as social media or email?
How well does the website reflect the client’s brand values and character through unique graphics and brand design?
How does the website help the client achieve business goals?
Who is responsible for maintaining and developing the site?
Trained web designers know how to find the answers to these questions and then apply them to create an attractive and profitable website for the client.

What a web designer does

A web designer’s tasks vary depending on their skills and work environment.
There are three popular scenarios: freelance work, agency work, and in-house work.

Freelance work.

Freelance web designers offer a range of services, depending on their skills and preferences.
In addition to the creative work of creating a website, they are also required to work with clients and handle business development.
The plus side is that you can choose the projects you want to work on, but freelancing involves discipline in terms of case management so that the routine doesn’t eat away at the creativity.

Agency work

In an agency where the business is put on stream, web designers don’t have to worry about finding clients, but in return they get less freedom in their choice of projects.
The composition of web design projects in an agency is influenced by the agency’s suite of services and team.

Work on staff

Web designers on staff usually work on one main company website or a small lineup. They may oversee a specific module or a specific section on a larger site.
Many companies use the company Web site as a “flight control center” for their online marketing efforts — a place where they can direct potential customers to learn more about the company’s services or buy a product.
This means that today’s web designers need serious experience in various aspects of design and Internet marketing to succeed.

Here’s what web designers need to be proficient in:

Graphic design. Web designers work with color, fonts, photography, illustration, and composition – all of which help to tell a compelling compelling story and evoke certain feelings of the target audience.

UX design and interface design. The basics of UX help design scenarios on a website with nuances of user psychology in mind – this approach more often than not helps to hit basic customer expectations;
Web design is sharpened on conversions. The site – a system whose task – to sell. This means you need to understand what actions can influence the conversion rate;

Web development. Although some designers limit their work to designing sites, many also take on a portion of the code, especially the interface development.

Internet marketing. A web designer works shoulder-to-shoulder with digital marketing (SEO pros, SMM pros, Copywriters and Content Marketers). The frontline work is set by content, and understanding context is always a plus one to boldness and accuracy.

Client work and project management. Once the site is launched, the work is just beginning; developing the site is a separate big job of increasing conversions with new blocks, tweaks, creating expressive graphics and launching new pages. And there are many psychological subtleties of working with the client, which can be taken into account if you approach the organization of work competently.
Of course, to ensure the flow of customers do not have to be an expert in all these areas.

Web designers often prefer to specialize in one area: someone cool makes a unique graphic and promotional presentation, someone rubs in analytics and can crank out conversions, someone masters layout and minimizes the resources to launch the site, and someone specializes in a particular industry, for example, golf courses and golf pro.

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