Alright, so you found this brilliant idea for your next app and decided to build the MVP (Minimum Viable Product). You would have thought out many new exciting features to make your audience fall in love with it. Despite all the amazing features that you have planned out, there are some key components that you can include which will help you better engage, measure and collect the audience feedback, and they are mostly available for free. Let’s take a look at the top 5 essential components, and see how you can take advantage of those in your MVP app.
The components I discuss here today revolves around different areas of customer engagement, mainly – Measure, Issue resolution, Communication and Feedback.
Analytics
The keyword here is Measurement. You probably have heard of the saying, “What gets measured, gets done”. Once you build experience in the form of a feature, or content or a visual asset inside your app, it is very important to see how your audience reacts to it. Are they using it a lot, are they coming back to it and asking for more? Or do they abandon it, and never use it at all? If you don’t have a way to measure their behaviour, there is no way for you to know whether you should invest your time in improving it or not.
The most effective way to measure user behaviour is to add some sort of analytics. Most of the basic analytics tracking is all you need in most cases, however, pretty much every analytics software allows you to go custom tracking, thereby shedding more light on what your audience loves or hates. One thing to remember here is that you should not track your users more than what is needed. Meaning, you should not track your user behaviour at the expense of their trust, which is more important to you and your business more than anything.
Crash Reporting
To give you a small introduction on this topic, a crash is a result of any issue (also called as a bug) that critically affects your app, and causes it to terminate without the consent of your user. That will be very annoying to your users, and there should be a system in place to let yourself alerted without the user having to send an email saying what is going on.
Fortunately, there are systems that are currently available in the market, such as Crashlytics which is very easy to set up inside your app. When something unexpected causes the app to exit (crash), it automatically uploads a trace of what was happening just before the crash. You can then pass it on to your developers, and since it comes with a stack trace, there are clues everywhere to reproduce the scenario and provide a fix in the next release.
App update checker
As part of constantly bringing new and improved features (and some bug fixes) to your audience, you should also let them know when a new version of the app is available in the app store (or play store). This could be a simple alert that shows up when the old version is launched, giving the user an option to go to the app store and download the latest version.
Specifying what’s new in the latest update will increase the likelihood of updating the app. This could be a part of the settings section of your app, or you can utilize the app store section dedicated to this. Explaining the advantages, such as a brand new feature that a user requested for, or fixing bugs that are annoying to the users, will also increase the chances of users getting excited and thereby updating the app.
Review Prompt
Here is the scenario. You put tons of effort into figuring out the features, the UI / UX, developed it, tested it thoroughly, launched it and now it is time to get feedback from the real testers (outside of you or your team of internal testers). Although analytics provides a glimpse of areas that are (or aren’t) popular in the app, there is a little magic in asking users to provide feedback directly to you.
That being said, what are the best ways to collect feedback? There are quite a few numbers of ways to do this effectively. The most and easiest would be to add a review prompt that is inbuilt in the platform you develop on. For example, in iOS, Apple provides a way to directly show an alert inside of the app, that sends ratings and reviews to the app store. If you want to take things a little further, you can add a link to a feedback form on your website, or just a textbox where the user can directly reach out to you through email.
One key thing to consider here is the placement of these feedback forms. I’d suggest asking for feedback when the user has done something critical in your app. For example, if your app stream content such as news or movies, ask them for content quality and user experience, after watching 3 videos or something similar of that nature. Since your user performed that key thing, you will have a better chance of receiving the most appropriate feedback based on what they had experienced a few seconds ago.
Reachability
Don’t get overwhelmed with this term, which is borrowed from Apple’s SDK documentation here. All it means is a mechanism to identify if your application is properly connected to a network, in most cases, the Internet. Most apps (apart from games) require some sort of connectivity with another system or internet to function properly. Lack of internet connection is easily mistaken with the bugs in the app. For example, you let your user send a message to another person from within the app, and if it is not connected to the internet, it fails. As you can imagine, you would not consider this as a bug. So, make it obvious. All it requires is a small message somewhere prominent on the screen, which tells your user that there is no connectivity at this time. Proper messaging vastly increase the user experience, and your audience will really appreciate it.
Conclusion
All of the above-mentioned traits should come at a minimum or no cost to the user. These are put in place to let your audience help you, and you should not do it at the expense of the user experience. For example, if you are adding an alert to let your user know that a new version is available, add a button so that they can update in one click. Do not let them figure out how to do it themselves. Make it easy.