Boosting mobile app engagement is an essential aspect of modern mobile app development. With millions of mobile apps competing for users’ attention, it is crucial to optimize app engagement to ensure your app stands out in the crowd.
The evolution of human beings is the result of their intelligence being used for making lives easier. “Necessity is the mother of invention”. Here necessity almost always means ease of living. Ease of doing everything, with respect to hunting for food, shelter, and community bonding. This means that our ancestors always sought comfort and convenience and for that, they strove hard to make it possible.
This fact hasn’t changed at all in present times either. We always persevere to make our and our future generations’ lives easy.
This psychology has resulted in the emergence of huge businesses as we see them today. Businesses are born in order to serve people and make people’s lives easier and people are willing to pay big bucks in exchange for that. This means that as time passes, the competition between companies providing convenience in any sort of way keeps on increasing drastically. This trend is booming in the technology sector as people nowadays are crazy reliant on mobile phones and computers in their day-to-day lives.
Let’s talk about mobile phones for instance. The key factor that ensures smooth usability is not the features or functionalities the phone provides but its user-friendliness of it. Companies making smartphones and mobile apps need to be certain that human-computer interaction is as polished as possible. It is the main reason people would like to engage more and stick around for longer. Yes, we are talking about retention here.
Tips On How To Boost Your Mobile App Engagement
So, today let’s talk about how exactly can mobile app engagement and retention be increased or boosted by a user-friendly design.
Conduct Proper Market Research
Before developing an app, ensure that your application serves a genuine purpose. An app that does not solve a problem or serve a purpose will eventually die out in the market.
The user-friendliness of your app will depend upon how well you have understood your potential customers. Their pain points will serve as a guide to the functionalities of your app. And, how you let your users solve those pain points through your functionalities will serve as a guide to your design decisions.
It is imperative that you do not clutter your app with tons of functionalities that might hinder the user-friendliness of your app design. Limiting the features only to the solution of the pain points of the customers will go a long way in terms of retention.
Give Importance to User Interface and User Experience aka UI-UX
A simple and textbook definition of UI is as follows, the space where human-computer interaction occurs. In other words, the medium through which the user interacts with technology (in this case smartphones and apps) and how it responds to the user input is called UI.
Now, it becomes evident that this interaction must be easy for a smooth experience to occur. So, technically speaking User Interface and User Experience go hand-in-hand and needs to be a priority while designing an application.
A famous designer named Frank Chimero quoted, “People ignore design that ignores people”. Quite a small quote but powerful, wouldn’t you say? He cannot be more right. Think about it, if developers neglect the importance of a user interface it would lead to a bad user experience resulting in decreased retention and significant negative word-of-mouth.
Simply put, people will just dislike your app and never use it again! The contrary is pretty self-explanatory. People will love your app and spread the good word about it, which will not only increase the retention of your existing customers but also increase sales.
Data Security is Paramount
You understood the market demands and designed an app that serves an intuitive experience to your customers. Imagine the users having the best experience while using your app, and then one day they find out that their sensitive information has been compromised.
No matter how good your app is, once this happens, they will make sure to not only stay away from your current app but also from your future apps and products. Simply put, your company and app will lose their reputation resulting in a loss of business. You clearly don’t want that! So, it is very important to secure your app before its deployment. It sounds unrelated to the design specifications but good security is a crucial part of a user-friendly design of the app. It displays signs of robustness that lie within your app.
For starters, ensure your app has an SSL certificate to make it certain that it is secure to use. Moreover, the servers should be equipped with real-time threat-detecting tools. Conducting penetrating testing on a regular basis also serves as an important parameter in order to secure your app. Another cool security feature that can be added is to integrate Google, Apple or any other third-party login options which will not only make the user experience better but will also lessen your worries about data protection issues.
Do Not Reinvent the Wheel
It’s great to be original and a pioneer of an idea in technologies like mobile app development but not always. You see, people hate to learn new ways of approaching a problem. Neurons are always accustomed to following the same old neural pathways and it takes more effort to create new pathways.
In other words, people won’t like to learn a new way of logging into your app, or a new way of using a payment gateway during checkout. It kind of acts as a speed bump in terms of user experience. You might think you have created something unique and outstanding by developing/designing your own login page or a payment gateway. Still, if your users are not patient enough, (which they most probably are not) they might just abandon your app and start exploring further.
As mentioned above, it is wise to use a third-party integration for such use cases. It sounds like a minuscule detail but will go a long way in keeping your customers retained for a long time.
Do Not Neglect Branding
After thoroughly understanding every other aspect of user-friendliness, it is finally crucial to understand the importance of branding. Branding is basically nothing but how your customers feel about your product. It portrays the connection between the customer and the company/app.
Branding doesn’t just include the app’s logo but also signifies the mission of the company. The perception of your customer for your app says a lot about your branding. It includes the look and feel, the user-friendliness and the totality of the user experience of your app.
In short, branding is one of the most important aspects that makes or breaks user engagement and retention. The mobile app development sector is highly competitive and these tips will help you navigate through the intricate maze of this very competition.
Last Words
Now you know, what it takes to make the user experience as engaging as possible by keeping the user-friendliness of the design as a center point resulting in increased user retention!
