The 6 Vital Ways to Engage Users of Your App After a customer actually chooses your app, what makes them try it out and continue using it?
By Rahul Varshneya Edited by Dan Bova
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Imagine yourself at a huge Walmart filled with just 15 to 20 categories of items and more th2 million products within those categories to choose from. It would be mind-numbing trying to make a decision.
Now imagine this from the point of view of the brand. How do they grab your attention in all that clutter? It's equally mind numbing.
If you have an app idea and want to take it to the market, you are the "brand."
There are many way to make your app more engaging. Here are a few of the most important ones to factor in while creating your app:
1. Emulate the real world. The key to designing a fantastic app that delivers a rich user experience is to create a design that emulates the real life, subject or category that your app represents. For instance, if you're building a productivity app, study how people are behaving using physical products, and design an app that enhances the usability and experience.
Related: Building a Productivity App? Learn These 5 Productivity Methods.
2. Keep it simple and reduce the steps. "Here's the formula if you want to build a billion-dollar internet company. Take a human desire, preferably one that has been around for a really long time. Identify that desire and use modern technology to take out steps," Twitter co-founder Evan Williams said at a recent XOXO conference in Portland, Ore.
This truly is self-explanatory. The more simple you make it for the user, the better the experience and engagement.
3. Focus on one feature. This becomes more important when you're releasing the first version of your app. The design of the application, and by design I mean the user experience and the look and feel, should reflect the focus on that one feature that is the core of your app idea. Your users will engage with whatever you lead them to engage with on your app. Make sure it is that one feature that defines your app.
Related: How the Updated Google Maps Will Make Your Life Easier
4. Get deep customer engagement insights quickly. While engagement is measured by how frequently users come back to your app, the metrics can vary. Engagement can meaure how often users open the app, duration of usage, number of screens used and conversion rate for events. Depending on your app's goal, these metrics will tell you if your users consider your product indispensable. This will help you to quickly alter course or tweak certain features to adapt to customer demand.
5. Engage the individual user. Building a social networking-based app is probably the most difficult task today, primarily because one user's experience of the app depends on how many other people he/she can connect and interact with. On day one, this is the most challenging task when you have your first 100 or 1,000 users but little or no interaction between them. This is where you need to build some engagement by means of a feature in your app that can hold the interest of early adopters.
6. Make offline accessibility integral to the app design. There are many times when the user may not have network coverage or the data speeds may be too slow to download content on your app. For those times, build in such a way that the user has something to do in the app without necessarily having to be connected to get a good experience. For example, Instagram lets you browse through photographs, which are already in your stream even if you're not connected.
Continuous engagement means the user sees value in your app and is most likely to recommend it to their network, in turn helping your app gain traction through word of mouth.
Related: 4 Unconventional Ways to Turn Customers Into Brand Advocates
