Contact us
9 minutes

If you have ever visited our website, you know that we’ve spent many years working in software development. Sometimes we help companies rebuild and enhance their software, and sometimes — to maintain it. But the most frequent and the most loved process for us is building software from scratch.

Agree that creating a profitable and technologically savvy product with great customer experience often seems tricky. Especially when you read stories about closed-down startups and product failures every Sunday morning. Though there are plenty of companies that make their name every year. And the main difference between them and those which fail is customer focus software.

In this blog, we will share our own experiences on how to build a software product that will win the hearts of your customers.

How Do You Create a Customer Focus Software Product?

Intuitive Navigation

Designing easy-to-navigate software is a must if you want a successful product. And it’s not just our words, there is a lot of research proving that.

Proper navigation enables users to easily find the information they’re looking for and suggest information that is relevant to them and beneficial for you, for example, contact information, pricing plan, etc. This way, users spend more time on your software and are more likely to take action.

If you want to develop a website, for example, you must create a website navigation plan that will determine the “flow” of your website.

website navigation plan

Internal linking strategy is also an important part of intuitive website navigation which is somehow often neglected. Internal links not only improve UX by helping users to find more interesting content but also help search engines find and index the pages on your site and ultimately improve rankings.

Use Google Analytics to track how your website navigation is performing and show where the traffic is coming from.

Stay Connected and Streamline Customer Feedback

Customer insights shape your product roadmap. By gathering real-time data, you can learn who is your customer, enhance your product, and identify which customer problems to prioritize.

types of customer feedback

Managing customer feedback is typically broken down into 3 steps:

  1. Collecting Customer Feedback

Whether it’s a website, mobile (in-app), or email feedback, the rules are the same, keep it short, be clear in what you’re asking, and make sure it’s relevant. By leveraging both passive (constant feedback button) and active (behaviorally-triggered surveys), you can constantly receive new feedback from your customers.

2. Analyzing Customer Feedback

Customer feedback analysis is done through the application of dashboards and charts displaying feedback data. Try to analyze feedback over time to identify major drops or rises on metrics that will indicate to you what must be optimized.

3. Taking Action

The final step can be divided into two perspectives: internal and external actions. Reacting to customer feedback helps companies improve their products and services and build loyalty among customers.

A tip from inVerita. Digital products and services evolve fast and customer expectations even faster so it’s important to make gathering feedback an integral part of your strategy with the right customer feedback management tool.

Make Onboarding Straightforward

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. How many times did you give up registering or deleting the app that ran long authorization? The integration process should be simple and intuitive. The simpler the interface is, the better usability.

A great example is the Twitter onboarding process. The users can skip nearly every setup decision. Your bio? Optional. Your interests? Optional. Twitter’s simple and intuitive UI doesn’t need an explanation on how to start using its product during onboarding. Just follow at least one account on Twitter to fill your feed with relevant stories and you can start tweeting.

Entertain Users

How to build your own software program that makes the users spend time on it? Augment the app’s usability! Use great though simple design, employ human-computer interaction techniques, innovative brain-controlled interfaces, and head-up displays.

Software Building Process

software development cycle

Outsourcing Process

The technology sector has faced the biggest tightness in the labor market so far. According to the CompTIA Tech Jobs report, as of May 2022, the rate of unfilled IT jobs increased to 443k. Therefore, most businesses decide to partner with outsourcing software companies. Outsourcing allows companies to exceed the time to market, cut down expenses, gives them access to a large talent pool with specific expertise, and the ability to scale up fast.

Every software project has unique requirements, therefore, most outsourcing companies offer different types of outsourcing models to choose from. The three most common are:

cooperation models in outsourcing

A few tips on how to choose a reliable software vendor:

  • Define your business needs: determine “must-haves” and “nice-to-haves”;
  • Examine verified customer reviews on platforms such as Clutch, GoodFirms, etc.;
  • Check vendor credentials;
  • Clarify on additional fees before signing a contract (setup/onboarding/maintenance, etc);
  • Establish clear KPIs to track the performance of your development team;

Understand your contract: ownership of intellectual data, fees, term/termination, usage/restrictions, etc.

Product Idea Organization

Idea validation is the step when you adjust your vision and goals to the market and customer needs, defining the actual product demand. The aim of idea validation is to expose your future product to the end-user to predict customer response after the launch.

Assumptions are not idea validation. Idea validation requires physical and data proof that your idea is viable.

Your software should come from the problem it solves. Rapid prototyping is one of the most effective key tools to validate your idea in Agile. The user is put at the center of the problem and they give real feedback so you can estimate the real customer satisfaction in software development.

Another widely used method for idea validation is creating a landing page for your product. With a beta test for your product, you can analyze the conversion, add a typeform, use organic traffic, or drive ad traffic.

Software Planning

Typically, the software planning process occurs in two stages: when the product is initially visualized by the stakeholders and during the sprint planning sessions. We will delve into the second one.

Together with a customer, a software vendor builds a project plan that identifies, prioritizes, and assigns the tasks and resources needed to establish the structure for a project.

Having determined the main features your software should include and the type of application (whether it’s a native/cross-platform, or a PWA, etc), you can get a rough estimate of the cost of your software. If the customer is fine with a rough estimate, a vendor prepares a detailed one. A detailed estimate takes into account each development step, the number of people involved, the number of hours they will spend working on your software, and of course, all the features.

UI/UX Design

During the design stage, the team develops the visual solution of the product, a user interface design that defines how users will perceive the application.

Though software design goes far beyond visuals. The structure of your product’s interface, user flow convenience, and the way users interact with the app are covered by UX design.

A simple, consistent, and tailored to your user personas and journeys design should eliminate the time needed for your target audience to get used to it.

Software Architecture Design

Before starting major software development, we need to choose a suitable architecture that will guarantee the desired functionality and quality attributes of the software. So, you should understand various architectures before using them for design.

The most common 10 architectural patterns are:

  • Layered Pattern
  • Client-server Pattern
  • Master-slave Pattern
  • Pipe-filter Pattern
  • Broker Pattern
  • Peer-to-peer Pattern
  • Event-bus Pattern
  • Model-view-controller Pattern
  • Blackboard Pattern
  • Interpreter Pattern

Here you can find an informative explanation of each.

Development Process

Once the design step is complete, it’s time to move to the most complex and time-consuming stage — software development. During this stage, the software development team implements the scope of your project, requirements, and previously agreed functionality into coding to create a software product.

A customer receives a statement of work (SOW) which contains all the information on the development process: schedules, payments, the amount of work to be done, etc.

To ensure high standards of quality, we use agile project management methodologies and encourage our customers to take an active part in the development process by joining stand-ups, sprint planning meetings, end-of-sprint presentations, and so on. By staying in touch with the development team, you can evaluate progress, prioritize tasks, and plan together further activities.

Testing

Testing is extremely important as software bugs could be expensive and even dangerous.

For example, Nissan cars recalled more than 1 million cars from the market because of software failure in the airbag sensory detectors which caused two accidents. And there are plenty of such examples in history.

Properly tested software guarantees security, reliability, and high performance which result in customer satisfaction, cost-effectiveness, and time-saving.

Deployment and Further Iterations

The final stage is deploying the code into production, its support, and maintenance to keep the system functional and robust.

As soon as pre-launch testing shows that the product is ready for deployment, we move it to production. The production stage at our company includes release orchestration that coordinates all the activities in the pipeline.

automation vs orchestration

As soon as your product is rolled out, you need to constantly improve and update it. Usually, product owners sign a maintenance agreement with the development team which outlines the parts of the product that should be maintained, liabilities, etc.

A tip from inVerita: Start building your maintenance plan during previous stages of software development. This way, you can be sure that it covers everything you need to update, prevent, and adapt.

Tips for Building Great Software Products

Staying Detached

Every project’s founder is extremely passionate about their ideas and it would be strange if it was otherwise. Though it’s important to keep the balance — no matter how excited you are about your ideas, don’t be afraid to change them if there are any loopholes and weaknesses.

Be the User

Use your product every day to try your user’s shoes. This will help you spot some imperfections in UX, come up with some natural optimizations, and get ideas for new features. Believe it or not, even the situation of one button can drastically change customer satisfaction in the software industry.

MVP First

Focus on building a good MVP first. This will cost you much less but you will be able to make small, fast, and effective changes to your software through testing it.

Wrapping Up

Developing customer-centric products is the best strategy. Software architecture design requires a solid plan, stakeholder input, and a reliable software vendor. inVerita has gathered experts that will help you plan, design, and develop your software based on the best technology and design practices.

Create your own software with our team of professionals!

0 people like this

This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website.

Learn more
Thank you for getting in touch!
We'll get back to you soon.
Sending error!
Please try again later.
Thank you, your message has been sent.
Please try again later, or contact directly through email:
Format: doc, docx, rtf, txt, odt, pdf (5Mb max size)
Validate the captcha
Thank you, your message has been sent.
Please try again later, or contact directly through email: