Tokelezea team, Winners of the Kenya Challenge (Credit ForgetMeNot Africa)

It’s just 8 days before the submission deadline of the ZeTXT Apps Challenge and if you haven’t submitted your app yet, you need to get busy. As you may already know, the finals of the Kenyan edition of the challenge were held at a Hackathon at iHub a little more than a week ago. The winning team there, called Tokelezea, developed an SMS event check in and management application. FMNA posted on their site some tips by the Tokelezea developer, Nick Hargreaves, to help developers in the Zim edition of the challenge to prepare (to win).

We re-post here just in case you missed that article, and have been too lazy to participate in the Facebook discussions.

Be simple and intuitive
The app should be easy to understand and users should be able to quickly navigate and use it’s features without having to go through a manual first

Be Social
If there’s a way to add a social dimension in the app then you should try and utilize it. People always want to share what they’re up to and the content they are consuming. In the current tech scene, it’s difficult to sell applications that are not social. The way Tokelezea achieved this was to allow users to post comments and view comments and attendees.

Have a Large Target Market
The app should be useful to a large target market.

Be Practical
Think about the culture of the people you are building the app for. Think about how they usually do things and if the app would actually make sense to them.

Most importantly, take the feedback from the FMNA team seriously.
They know the Industry; they know what works and what doesn’t.