How To Increase The Chances Of Your App’s Success

(This is a guest blog post by Tope Abayomi)

If there is one thing that all app developers should know now, it is that obtaining user feedback from your current customers is much more helpful than reading their negative comments in the app store reviews.

No one enjoys seeing his or her hard work be lambasted by people who cannot grasp the scope of its existence. Although it is disheartening, and ego deflating, it also turns the app into something of little service to others. Before someone downloads an app, there is a good chance that they are going to read the reviews first. If they download the app without bothering with another’s opinion and find it hard to use, they may even leave their own negative feedback. Countering this negativity is possible with the next version or damage control marketing measures, but ideally, the creator should want to avoid them to begin with. After all, this ominous circle of negativity can send an app into the black hole of App Stores everywhere, never to be seen again.

Get better ratings by avoiding negative reviews

Instead of envisioning an app world of mayhem, developers everywhere are realizing that with a simple testing period of a minimum viable product, consumer test groups can provide feedback before the app launches. But why stop there? You should keep gathering feedback even while your app is live.

What is a Minimum Viable Product?

A minimum viable product does not mean that it is less of a product than it will be in its finalized form. In the app world, it simply means that it has enough functionality to deploy its capabilities, but is not coded to complete operation.

Keep your v1.0 simple and iterate with feedback from the people using your app

This means you can open it, review its contents and show it off to others as a prototype, without spending an exhausting amount of time or money insuring its overall functionality through coding and programming. It allows you to gauge interest, excitement, feedback, and the overall need for your app, before you take it to the completion stage.

A minimum viable product is tested on a controlled group of people, whose comments and conclusions on its testing can be accounted for. This means you can let people know they are responsible for helping you create a better product together. That is the important word “together.” People love to be included in the creation of things. The idea is to find a forgiving audience, one who knows that this is only a beginning but could benefit from the final product’s existence.

Get Your Users To Help You Create The Best Product Possible

Think of it this way: If you give someone an app and say, “This app is going to do this in v1.0. Here it is in its most minimal functionality. Play with it.” When that introduction and testing period is followed up with surveys for the consumer to address, they can provide honest and accurate feedback.

Iterate with your app customers to build a better product

This will deliver information regarding what they were expecting, and how the app lived up to those expectations. It can also tell the developer how great or how poor its performance ranked overall, which means they can take that information back to the drawing board and fine tune the application for v2.0.

How Surveys Insure a Better Minimum Viable Product

It is practically impossible to fund every idea that your genius mind creates, which means when it comes to getting app creation right the first time, surveys can be a key financial component to its success. Creating a minimum viable product allows you to display the app’s genius, without developing it completely. This means no more ill-advised turns in the wrong direction, which have to be fixed with a costly 2.0 programming option that may or not be entertained by the masses.

Better communication helps to create a better product

Surveys will provide you with all of the feedback you could possibly need to hone the app’s capabilities and smarten its aptitude. Certainly there will be answers like, “I wish it were blue” that have no bearing on its functionality, but you have to take the good information with the unrelated comments. It is all part of the process. Once the survey’s feedback has been adapted to the app, it becomes a better version of its previous existence. You are still at minimal financial output and can test it again on another audience, gathering their feedback as well.

What Intelligence can you get from Surveys and Feedback Forms?

There are a number of things you can determine with surveys and feedback forms. At the core of the forms’ content should be finding out exactly what features the people are interacting with during the test. What do they like about the app? What do they love about it? All of these things should definitely end up in the final version. What do they dislike or find confusing? Remove it, or fine tune it.

Knowing what the customers enjoy, and what they do not, can help you reduce negative feedback when the app goes to market. Once customers air their grievances, others will read it, and some of it is not transferable back to the developer, so all hope is lost for a solution.

Beat reviewers to the punch by providing them with what they are asking for through the use of surveys and feedback forms. If they happen to list items that simply are not available at the time, make notes from their requests, and adopt them to version 2.0 of the app. It is the least you can do to appease your fans.

Editors Note: This is a guest post from Tope Abayomi, Founder of App Design Vault. Some people may still prefer to come to your website to get in touch with you. If you need a landing page for your app, download a free one here.

Image sources: Sam Newsome, Ash Maurya