5 Features That Great Mobile Apps Have in Common
If you’re planning on developing an app, it’s useful to examine successful apps that came before yours and determine what qualities they share. Are they utilizing certain UI design principles? Or did they implement a novel pricing structure? Let’s take a look at 5 features that great mobile apps have in common so you can apply those qualities to your own software.
Low Initial Price Point
Free apps have become the standard in app stores. Offering apps for free is a useful tactic that businesses use to increase their apps’ downloads, leveraging the huge user base that these two platforms have worldwide. The key to success is to offer enough value to keep users engaged, incentivizing the purchase of advanced features within the application. Offering your app for free can seem counterintuitive, but it’s the best way to secure users and get traction within the market. If you have multiple apps, try giving one or two away for free, even without ads, to get users excited about your paid products.
Accessible UI Design
Successful apps help users get more done through a clean, smooth, and intuitive user interface design. This is a common attribute shared by successful apps. An app’s effectiveness is tied directly to how users interact with it. Even with the best functionality backing it, an app can fail if its UI/UX is hard to use. This aspect of the app’s development should be given utmost care while designing it. Try to create a graphics design language that encompasses unique, clean, and polished UI elements. This gives a lasting impression in people’s minds while making it easy for them to navigate your app’s functions and features.
Ease of Use
Eliminating barriers to entry is another trait of successful apps. You may lose users if they find your app hard to navigate in their initial time with the software. This loss of users is known as a hard bounce, and it can spell disaster for an application that depends on wide adoption by the public. It’s important to test your app with different user groups to see how they feel while interacting with the app’s content across different devices and environments. UI elements should be highly visible and text should be readable and straightforward. Overloading too much content or buttons within the interface design may create confusion for users. Spend time making your app usable by different kinds of users.
Fast and Reliable Performance
Have you ever used an app that loaded too slowly, crashed, or completely shut down while running? These kinds of apps will not stay installed on users’ devices for long. All successful apps have fast response times and run persistently on background threads, requiring less than a few seconds to load. On the contrary, poor app performance results in negative user experiences and will eventually reduce downloads, revenue, and brand perception. In order to maintain high performance, an app must be tested properly to ensure consistency and reliability across devices before it’s released to the public. Testing and quality assurance are key parts of releasing a successful app to the public. Beyond release on the app stores, be prepared to fix bugs and update the app as new operating system versions are released.
Regular Updates and Analytics
Successful apps evolve over time to add or enhance their features and streamline the way they operate. Updates can add new features, address security issues, and improve the reliability of the software. Successful apps have built-in features to record feedback from their customers and to execute in-app analytics. This helps to track downloads, user engagement and retention, and identify which app functions users find the most useful. By viewing the app as a living, breathing product, successful apps retain users by identifying and reacting to their needs, as well as evolving the product to be better over time.
Understanding the fundamental qualities of successful mobile apps is essential to bring your own app to the market. Even more important than that is finding the right partner to work with to create your software. If you’re considering developing an application, contact one of our account executives today to find out how we can help you leverage our decades of experience creating powerful mobile applications for our clients.
