Thousands of mobile apps are released every day in Google Play Store and Apple App Store. Getting users to download your app into their phones can be exhausting and challenging. You probably spend a lot of cash in the process too, especially in terms of opportunity cost, promotions, and marketing materials. In reality, getting users to download your app into their phones is just only half the battle won. You still need to make sure they stay loyal and use your app. On average, according to Andrew Chen, you are bound to lose 80% of the new users within three days, and to make matters worse, it’s the norm.
Whether your app will break or make it depends on the user experience design. For that reason, it’s equally important in choosing your mobile app development agency in Singapore. You want to choose an agency with experience in launching successful apps with a heavy emphasis on user experience design. Most users will remove your app if they find your app confusing or too complex to understand. Hence, in order to improve your app retention ratio, you should consider mobile onboarding.
What is Mobile App Onboarding?
Onboarding is the process of teaching and making users how to use your app for the first time. The objective is to make users familiar with your app. Some of the common reasons why you should consider onboarding are such as:
- Your mobile app (example – budget apps) requires the user to populate the app with data as the default installation is empty.
- Your mobile app is complex to understand and requires a learning curve. Onboarding helps your user to get familiar with basic interaction.
- Your mobile app has undergone a major redesign.
- Your mobile app has implemented new features that are complex and require an explanation.
Onboarding helps first-time users to understand your app fully and increases the likelihood of them converting from first-time users to full-time users of your mobile application. Here are some of the common onboarding techniques that have been proven to work in the past:
Documentation or Tutorials
Swipe through tutorials remains one of the most popular onboarding techniques. It usually happens once the user launched their app for the first time. The objective of the tutorial is to introduce the user to the function of the app and the possibilities the app can do. Some developers have gone the extra mile by incorporating animated swipe-through tutorials, which has shown to improve retention ratio by a huge margin. The reason behind this is animated tutorials are more engaging and fun.
Visual or Graphical Hints
The second most popular option is probably a visual hint. Visual hint gives the user a quick glance into what each button or function of an app does. In practice, however, visual hints hardly achieve or improve user retention ratio. In order to understand the reason behind this, you must first put yourself under the shoe of the customer. There is little context and the users are easily bombarded with too much information or instruction on how to use your app.
Improving User Retention Rate
In order to improve your mobile app retention rate, you must first understand the psychology behind users’ behavior and mind. In today’s digital world where attention has become an expensive commodity, users are downloading an app and launching them to solve a problem in the shortest amount of time. If your app is dragging and taking up too much time, the user is encouraged by their own behavior to seek a simpler alternative that solves the issue.
It doesn’t matter if your app is beautifully designed unless it solves a fundamental need – getting a problem solved within the shortest period of time. Anything else beyond that is just a bonus. For your mobile app project, it is therefore important to look for an app development agency in Singapore that specializes in user experience design in order to solve the problem of poor retention rate.
