In our last post, we discussed the first three things that can increase retention for your mobile application development. Here are the final aspects for you to digest, so you can make your app a huge success.

For review, here is the entire list of recommendations:

Usability
Updates
Marketing  & Acquisition
Design
Integration

Design

Design is a generic term for the less succinct idea of “putting all of your ‘outside-the-box’ thinking into ‘the box’ without sacrificing the user experience.”

Design describes the internal workings of the application that are not generally visible to the public, but that are vital to the proper function of the application.

How does this effect retention? Up until just this week, iPhone apps download sizes were limited to 10mb (and were just increased to 20mb on 3G phones.)  This means that developers need to fit a ton of programming and design into a teeny tiny space, and still make it easy to update, and provide all the functionality that you need. Essentially, it means that most apps are “hollow” and look great on the outside, but have nothing on the inside.

The issue here is that many developers are not able to include your entire vision into your app because of the size limitations, which may leave your app with only ‘skin-and-bones’ features and no real meat. This creates a very interesting shell that may garner a lot of downloads, but without any depth, people quickly lose interest and find the delete button.

However, with proper guidance from user experience and graphics teams, your application can incorporate the best of both worlds, providing a robust application and powerful graphics to make your iPhone or Android app have long-term success. Let us assist you with our in-house graphics team.

Integration

Integration means two things: First, does it integrate into the user’s life, or provide them some benefit or convenience?  And second, does it help you accomplish your business goals?

Business integration

Even though we are talking about user retention, it is important that you, the creator or developer of the app, receive some benefit as well. Otherwise there is no incentive for you to keep it around, and the app quickly becomes abandoned because there is no reason to keep funding it. Even most of the free “for the good of mankind” apps out there are sponsored or developed by companies looking to get a subtle benefit.

When customers come to us for application development, one of the first things we ask is a question that goes something like, “what are you trying to accomplish?”  Although many customers answer with “I want to build an app that does …” we are really looking for an answer as to why you want an app. When people hire us, we want to make sure that the app will help them meet their goals, in addition to being a great experience for the end users.

Understanding this is as an important aspect of development as anything else. If the app does not do for you business what you wanted it to do, then user retention is irrelevant and redesign may be necessary because even you will not want to keep it around. Although nobody can guarantee that you will successfully reach your goals even with a well designed and targeted app (such is business), it is important that the app be at least appropriately designed to be capable of reaching those goals.

User Integration

I’d also like to point out the importance working with the user and designing the app to be integrated into their lifestyle. As previously mentioned, this is the second part of integration success. Using the example from the pizza restaurant app from the previous post, you must also integrate the app into their phone and into their habits so that they at least consider using it every time they get the urge to eat out.

There are definitely some tricks to this, but as a one paragraph summary, it really is the culmination of everything else you’ve done: marketing, great usability, excellent design, and frequent updates that remind the user that the app is still there.

The benefit to an app is that your target customer will literally carry you around in their pocket everywhere they go. This gives you a potentially huge advantage over your competitors, but you need to make sure that people want to carry you. You need to provide them with a clear and obvious benefit, and a reason to lug you around.

In Conclusion

Creating an application is not a pass/fail process. Like almost everything else, quality matters. To make a comparison, it is like creating a personal Facebook account but never logging in, accepting friends, or responding to friendly inquiries. Are you on Facebook?  Yes, technically. But it is not doing anything for you, and may even be hurting since you seem to ignore everyone who would be interested. App development works the same way:  having a bad app is much worse than having no app at all.

What this means is that you need to understand that creating an app is an investment and a commitment. It also means that if you are looking to get into the app business, you may be much better off investing in an experienced third party developer that can guide you through the process and manage it with you until you are ready to take over.