How Much Does it Cost to Build an Event App?

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The event industry is evolving at the speed of light and one of the best ways to capitalize on its explosive growth is building event apps. Building an event app could be a bit expensive depending on the features you add. The typical price for an event app ranges from $5000 to over $500,000 but, as the saying goes, you get what you pay for. To make things easier for you, we’re letting you get an estimate on the price of your event app here.

Over 85% of event planners will make use of event registration software to facilitate faster registrations. It’s all about giving audiences an unforgettable experience while maximizing the event ROI – the best of both worlds.

At least 75% of event professionals who don’t use event applications plan on adopting them sometime in the future. Your competition as an event professional will increase; the sooner you have an event app ready, the faster you’ll capture your target audience.

And before you get started on Facebook for your event planning needs, take note that it only serves as a valuable promotional tool to create awareness about the event. The actual registration, planning, coordination, and scheduling will be done through the event.

Problem is, it’s not easy to build a fully functioning event app. Even a ‘normal’ business app with fewer endpoints will cost anywhere from $100,000 to $140,000 depending on their features and functions. The risks and variables involved when planning and developing an event app are simply greater. There is a ton of information that has to be managed in real-time, requiring developers to exercise precision and accuracy – both of which take time and money.

Most event planners will incorporate the following set of features in their event app:

  • Information on the list of speakers
  • Constant news updates about the venue, etc
  • Report briefings
  • Accurate event scheduling
  • Interactive maps for the venue
  • In-depth information on event sponsors
  • Integration with social media tools
  • Ratings
  • … And much more

Depending on the event planner’s needs and budget, the event app may also come with messaging capabilities that allow participants to communicate with each other. Some speakers also like having the ability to ask attendees questions for constant feedback, which is best done with polls.

Every extra feature will add to the amount of time spent developing the app which, of course, adds to your total costs. Below are the main factors that will affect the cost of creating an event app.

Which Platform Should I Choose for My App in 2020?

What will you choose? A web-based platform or a mobile app? Or maybe both?

If you plan on porting the event app to various platforms, including iOS and Android, the development cost and time will increase based on your needs. For instance, the Android platform development efforts will take at least 200 to 3,100 hours. This may be expensive for some businesses especially if they plan on adding all the bells and whistles.

For the most part, event planners will likely settle with hybrid application development because it is far more affordable and allows at least 70% of the code to be reused on other platforms once it has been developed for one.

GPS Connectivity

Smartphone users are becoming increasingly dependent on GPS connectivity to guide them through busy roads and streets as they struggle to find their destination. This is why event apps must also incorporate map-based GPS services to help users. While users can just as easily swap out the app with a more dedicated tool like Google Maps or Apple Maps, doing so only adds to the hassle.

The best way to maximize user interactivity is to provide them with GPS connectivity built in the app. This obviously increases the development time needed to implement the new feature in the event app.

Event Agenda

Think of event agendas as the heart and soul of your event app. Event agendas are a great way to help your guests get to the event on time. This is an essential feature that your guests will use and depend on. Most events such as conferences and seminars are characterized by multiple breaks that often occur at the same time. Attendees need to know which ones they can attend and which ones they should cancel in case it conflicts with their schedule.

An event agenda gives your guests the ability to save sessions that they are interested in. It also gives them an easy way to view their favorite schedule. The last thing they want is to revisit an event or session that they already skipped before during their research.

Post-Event Surveys

Surveys help event planners measure the success of their event. Unfortunately, few event planners give due consideration to post-event surveys. In fact, at least 55% of event professionals believe they don’t properly measure the success of their events properly. This is where post-event surveys or feedback forms come in.

59% of event professionals listed down feedback surveys as the most important way to measure the success of their live event. All event planners want to know what features worked, what didn’t, and what went wrong. This is where post-event surveys come in. They let you collect honest feedback from guests who will be more than happy to voice their concerns and complaints if something goes wrong.

Once you have identified which areas of the app need improvement, you can start fixing themes right away. Most event professionals miss out on collecting this information because they send requests for surveys long after the event was held; at this point, fewer guests are willing to share their suggestions and feedback. To make your surveys quick and easy, give your guests the ability to send their reviews in real-time. It should ideally be done with a few taps instead of combing through long and drawn out questionnaires that waste their time. You can always add an optional section for longer reviews to let users share as much or as little of their feedback as they want to.

Social Features

No event app can survive without being well-connected with social media networks. This is the primary way to maximize user engagement and reach a large chunk of your target audience. Once again, users can always open another tab, window, or app to check their social media. But as mentioned above, most smartphone users would rather do this within the app to save time.

The best part about social media is that it is completely free of charge unless you are running ads. Adding social features to your event app will increase development costs and time. But this cost is definitely worth it since users will find it much easier to share information and post what they did at the event.

If possible, try adding support for multimedia features too such as photographs, videos, gifs, and more. Adding support for social media will increase your traffic as more users will download it out of curiosity.

API Interface Integrations

API interface platforms are extremely useful for event-based companies if they plan on selling tickets, merchandise, and collecting donations. APIs are responsible for point-to-point integration for the exchange of data, including payments. Once again, the idea is to provide access to users. This is best done by adding digital payment gateways so guests can purchase tickets without ever having to leave the app.

Adding this feature will obviously drive up the costs because of the extra number of additional hours and resources that your development team will put into API integration. The ideal event app should be compatible with most major payment processors including PayPal, Visa, bank transfers, and even cryptocurrency.

Offers and Discounts

Who doesn’t like having generous discounts that cut down the price by a significant margin? Most users love the instant gratification that comes with small discounts and the potential freebie. Instead of sending offers and promo campaigns into their inbox, you can send notifications directly through the event app. You’ll soon notice that customer loyalty will increase as users utilize more of your event services.

Conclusion

Can you make an event app at an affordable price while getting all your desired features? Yes, you can! The trick, however, is to find the right team to develop your apps at an affordable price that fits your budget.

If you are looking to create an event app for your business and wonder how much it will cost, then get in touch with our development team at NS804. We will offer you the best possible price while delivering superior event applications that will maximize your ROI.

 

8 Benefits of Enterprise Application Development

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Businesses that develop mobile apps are becoming increasingly efficient. From payment banks to e-commerce businesses and health care, almost every single industry will improve its market value with the help of mobile applications. Success in today’s highly interconnected world is all about leveraging big data and existing business processes. Developing enterprise apps is one way to become more effective.

Below are 8 benefits of enterprise apps:

1. Enterprise Apps are Improving Worker Productivity

Any competitive business must invest in enterprise mobility if they want to increase sales, improve inventory, and incur fewer operational costs. Efficiency in all three areas can be improved by developing enterprise apps with data analytics.

Mobile developers also have the task of pairing analytical tools with the mobile app to maximize productivity. One particularly well known software application that to track important analytical data is Kumulos. It enables businesses to monitor the developmental life cycle of their app and make suitable adjustments throughout for maximum benefit.

2. Company Apps Empower Employees

A large number of companies have employees out there in the field, including delivery services, airport mechanics, and truck drivers. Subtle improvements in their everyday operations can drive up productivity and with it, profits. Enterprise apps give these workers access to real-time data and insights related to their processes.

This data is then fed back into the cloud in the form of business intelligence. This can be particularly helpful to the sales team because they can tap into a variety of available data, including press releases, finical reports, market analysis, research papers, and more. Bonus points if the application is powered with algorithms that can procedurally generate insightful information based on data from third party sites.

The best part is that most enterprise apps can be configured to integrate with important business processes. You will notice that the more users you have on the mobile app, the better your productivity. Enterprise apps maximize productivity by ensuring the following three:

  • Accessibility to work anytime and anywhere
  • Encourages work-life balance
  • Easier communication between different departments

3. Enterprise Apps Save Time

It is not easy to store or retrieve data from your laptop or desktop while you are away from them. Not to mention the fact that employees won’t stay on their desks all the time. Going back and forth between their computers and laptops increases the time that employees could have spent being more productive.

For example, in an organization of over 200 employees, it would take around 10 minutes for a worker to go back to their desk, retrieve data, and then share it with each other.  And while they do this, they are also shifting the attention of other employees from the job they were previously working on.

But using enterprise apps can save your employees’ time since they can just as easily retrieve the data or report from the cloud from their phones.

This also raises another important issue: employees will no longer have to fill up large and tedious forms that take up too much of their time. Instead, the enterprise app allows you to generate reports from drop down lists and menus that are much easier to use and generate. This makes it easier to process sales, generate invoices, and speed up marketing efforts.

4. It is Cost Effective

There are many operations in a single organization, and implementing technological tools for each department would be extremely difficult.

It doesn’t make sense to implement various tech tools for each department for two reasons, i) it would take time to teach employees how to use the tool ii) maintenance will eat up your profits. An enterprise app is a far more effective solution because it can be used by all departments at the same time.

Not only is this more cost effective, but it also lets you make decisions faster and more precisely.  The use of apps will also cut down on the use and dependence on paper. You can hire a cloud service to store and process the data, this is a far more effective solution than to spend money on hardware and other tools. Using agile cloud technology also means you won’t have to use expensive tools at the workplace.

5. Creating New Opportunities

One of the main benefits of enterprise apps is that key stakeholders and decision makers in your organization can know and respond to new opportunities at a moment’s notice. This allows your company to stay ahead of market trends, address reputation management problems, tackle supply chain problems – and a lot more from a single app that you control.

6. Developing Enterprise Apps is Cheaper

Developing a new app on Android and iOS has become significantly more affordable over the years. The best part is that you don’t have to hire a team of developers to build an app for you. The development and maintenance of enterprise apps can be sourced to an app development agency instead. Since they are generally more experienced at app development, app development agencies can build new apps in a shorter period of time using fewer resources.

The best part about app development is that you can always add or remove features based on popular demand and analytical surveys.

7. Improve Customer Experience and Satisfaction

Developing an enterprise app becomes all the more important if you want to improve customer experience. Good customer service depends on how fast your employees can respond to queries and feedback of customers. The speed of your response can play a big role in improving customer satisfaction.

Once again, this is not possible to do since employees are not always available at their desks and getting to and from the computer will delay their actions. Moreover, being able to make responses to customer queries on an enterprise app in an instant is the best way to improve customer engagement. The presence of instant support enriches the user experience and leads to higher revenue and sales.

8. Stay Ahead of the Competition

The cutthroat industry does not favor businesses that are slow to move and respond to changes. Enterprise apps are usually always on the bleeding edge of technology. They create a sense of belonging among employees since they can just as easily log in to their systems at the time of their choosing. This allows employees to optimize their talent pool in the most efficient way possible.

Businesses that don’t take advantage of enterprise apps will find themselves severely short-staffed. This may be true even though they may have more employees than their immediate competition. It’s like bringing a knife to a gun fight.

Conclusion

A large number of businesses are using or plan on using enterprise apps in the near future. Furthermore with Enterprise apps, you can provide a more comprehensive customer experience, increase productivity and make better decisions while pooling your entire talent pool together. NS804 can help you control and transform your systems rapidly. Our team of expert app developers can help with Android app development and iOS app development based on your specific requirements.

For more information, feel free to reach out to us by clicking the link here and leave your feedback.

How to Build an App That People Want (in 8 simple steps)

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It’s official: most online users have an attention span of fewer than 8 seconds; that’s less than that of a goldfish. People want a solution to their problem and they want it now, like an impatient child at the toy store. It’s why Uber, Doordash, and Airbnb are so ridiculously successful because it takes mere seconds to make a booking and get stuff done!

All three apps reduce otherwise long and drawn out processes into a relatively straightforward booking; whether it’s a long commute, food cravings, or renting a place to crash for the night. The biggest indicator of success for any idea is instant gratification; because who has the time to wait?

So if your app can satiate the growing demand for instant gratification, then you have a market. But not all mobile apps become instant sensations. Users adore some apps and despise others. So, how can you build an app that people will want to use? In this post, we’ll unravel the thought process that goes into designing and building an app from the ground-up.

How to Build an App that People Want?

Step 1: Come Up with an Idea

Every good app must start with an idea. The app doesn’t have to be clever or reinvent the wheel. As long as it builds and improves upon an existing solution, it will resonate well with the target audience. Bonus points if it leverages instant gratification and speeds up an existing process.

Use a pen and paper to draw up a rough sketch of your app and what it should look like. Next, prepare a list of features for the app and divide them into ‘must-have’ and ‘nice-to-have’ categories. The ‘must-have’ features are essential for your app. The ‘nice-to-have’ features serve as a plus point, but they are not crucial to the overall user experience.

Step 2: Create an MVP

Once you have determined which features to include in your app, you can create a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). The MVP essentially focuses on the problem-solving features and the overall functionality of your app. All other items can be stripped or let out of the MVP to gain market exposure and gauge user demand. The MVP is the most basic concept of your app and lets you collect feedback early on. This will save you time when planning your next move.

Step 3:Design a Functional Prototype

It is good practice to make mockups or functional prototypes of your app to test with users on their phones. Simply put, a mockup contains the user interface, layout, and navigational flow of the app. It does not contain UI elements or complex color schemes. It merely gives you an idea of what the final app should look like without creating any distractions.

At NS804, we always use prototyping to help clients gain an idea about user journeys and to deliver a preview of what a final product may look like. No matter the scope of your project, having a functional visual reference makes life a lot easier. We often use Adobe Xd, Invision, and Balsamiq to create high-fidelity prototypes that look and work exactly how you envisioned.

Step 4: Get into Graphic Design

Once your project kicks off, it’s time to give more serious consideration to UX and UI. Both of these are often confused together in terms of app design. Simply put, UI stands for ‘user interface’. It is the graphical layout of your application and consists of the buttons users will tap to get from point A to point B, the text, images, text entry fields, sliders, and everything else the user may interact with.

This includes transitions, animations, layouts, and every tiny interaction on the app. This is mostly the job of UI designers who decide what the app is going to look like. They brainstorm ideas for the color scheme and button shapes, line width, and font size used.

In other words, UI is all about aesthetics.

UX stands for ‘user experience’. It defines how users interact with the app and all its assets. Is it a smooth and intuitive experience or clunky and cluttered? UX designers make sure that people efficiently accomplish the tasks they want to achieve without struggling. Success really comes down to how intricately woven the UX is with the UI – in other words, how easy or difficult it is for users to interact with the UI elements that the designers have created.

Improving UI and UX means going out of your comfort zone and investing time and money into graphic design. Your app should have high-quality graphics, crisp visual details, image assets, and even motion design- if needed. If you’re not very comfortable with graphic design, consider hiring an expert or using a graphics template.

Step 5: Hire an App Developer

Now that you have laid the groundwork for the app, it’s time to start building it. You can build iOS apps with Xcode to code in Swift or Objective C. You build Android apps with Android Studio. Consider using cloud-based servers like Kumulos Firebase to store data. Alternatively, you can seek a development company that has the right team to help you bring your ideas to life.

Step 6: App Analytics

Use Kumulos app analytics to measure your app’s performance. App analytics improves ROI in every aspect of performance because they allow you to create personalized, customer-centric apps. How users engage with menus, the time they spend on your app, the services that they like best, etc will help you optimize your app to drive up user engagement. There are many free and paid analytical tools that let you measure different user metrics such as the total number of downloads, app usage, bounce rates, etc.

Step 7: Conduct Market Research for the Perfect Launch

Like all products, your app will need a detailed analysis of your target audience. You’ll need to learn about their spending pattern and preferences. Even the most extraordinary of all apps will be of no use without if it doesn’t have an audience. Here’s what you need to ask yourself:

  • Who are my competitors?
  • Are there any alternative apps for potential customers to use?
  • What should I charge for the app?

Once you have the right information, you can optimize your app around your users’ pain points.

Step 8: Launch the App, Get Feedback, and Update

Prepare a suitable title for the app and submit it to the App Store and Play Store for review. Once Apple and Google approve your app, you go live. Now, your potential customers are ready to download and install it.

However, this isn’t the end of your app’s journey. You will still need to promote the app on social media and through PPC campaigns. Also, take user feedback into consideration and update the app accordingly. The best way to obtain feedback is by conducting surveys and interviews.

Building an app is an on-going journey and you will run into your fair share of ups and downs. The important thing is to stay on top of the latest trends and optimize your app based on user preferences.

Get in touch with the app development pros at NS804 to learn more!