Mobile App Design Tips to Make An App Engaging and User-Centric

While designing and developing a mobile app, one of the end goals for every designer is – engagement. What is that? Engagement is creating a mobile app that encourages user to stick and stay longer with a Mobile App Design. designing a mobile app that engages and encourages user to stay longer with an app is all about user-friendliness and functional simplicity. And, now it has become tough for a user to capture a mobile user’s attention for a longer run and keep it. According to a research done in 2015 by Forrester Research – the US and UK Smartphone owners use an average of 24 apps every month, but on an average they spend more than 80 percent of their in-app time on just five to six apps. Most of the users discard most of the app within just 30 days of download.

Today Instagram is one of the social networking apps that offer user-centric and one of the most engaging user experiences in the industry. On an average 35% of Instagram’s 300 Million active users check Instagram multiple times a day and use the Instagram app for almost 21 minutes every day. Let’s see what your app can learn from Instagram’s huge success?  Here’s a list of 10 design tips that will help you know how to make your mobile app engaging and user-centric.

1. Should be self-explanatory: By using familiar visual metaphors and required behaviors, you can Make an App user-centric and engaging.

2.  Add friendly Language: It will help you in making your calls to action clear.

3.  Use instant Gratification: It will help you in balancing the freedom to explore and guidance to reach the workflow aim as effectively as possible.

4. Enhanced and Perceived Performance: Load times can be minimized and you can “trick” users by designing user-centric workflows that obscure delays.

5.  “Golden Nuggets”: By providing small and pleasant mobile interactions that make users feel surprised and delighted. However, these features aren’t functionally essential, but they are crucial to have amazing user experience.

6. User Value Proposition: While asking for information about the user, always offer a positive exchange in functionality.

7. Transparent User Interface: Eradicate perceived obstruction between the user and the content. And, once the Interface achieves this level of transparency, the UI will begin to fade away for the user.

8. Easy Navigation: You need to create a flow that requires just 1-2 fine touches to get the relevant content. And, anything more than that will tend user to give up.

9.   Rewarding Behaviors: Once user completes an essential action, your app should be capable to deliver visual, aural and perceptible responses so that success can be confirmed.

10. Strategic Alerts & Notifications: By delivering a sense of urgency, make users to open an app or take a required action. But you need to be careful in terms of tone and frequency as too many notifications can annoy users.

Hope the above mentioned tips will help you in understanding the mobile design tips in order to make your app engaging and user-centric.

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How to Increase Mobile App Marketing?

Before digging into one of the most popular concerns and strategies i.e. How to increase mobile app marketing, let’s take a look into a few stats:

According to Cezary Pietrzak, director of marketing at Appboy, today retention is one of the biggest challenges in mobile app world, because 65% of users usually stop using apps almost after three months of their install.  And, according to a recent report released from Google, 25 percent of apps are used just once before being made redundant. In an another recent Mobile Customer Retention Report it is found that the Average App Loses more than 75% Of Its users right next day. And, according to this data we can say that one of the biggest challenges among Appreneurs is – “Mobile App Marketing”. Poor app engagement and retention rates have become recipe for the failure of any app. Hence the challenge of Mobile App Design is increasing with time and it’s beyond app development stage. Building a mobile app and publishing it to the app store is just the beginning. Once Make an App is developed, the prime focus should be to motivate as many app users as possible. And, to increase the retention rate, increase in the monetization opportunities is required and an app should be boosted in the app charts as well. An Appreneurs key focus is to maximize the mobile app retention rates and convert their first-time users into long term app users. So, being an app entrepreneur, you must be looking for the effective ways on how to encourage app users and re-engage them with the app. Let’s take a look at a few top strategies on how to Increase mobile app engagement and retention rates: 

 

Create value

If an app does not create any value to its users, then it’s of no use to build an app. If your app is not capable of enticing users and retaining them, then it’s of no use to invest tine and money on your app. Being an app entrepreneur, you want to see your mobile app topping the charts and earning lots and lots of downloads. And, for establishing loyal users and retaining them for longer interval of time, you need to create an app that brings value and revenue to your business. So, to make your app user-centric and revenue generating; you need to ask yourself a few questions including – why should users keep using your app? What are the features that your competitor app has and what makes them glued with your app? Why should users choose your app over your competitor’s app? Does your app have the capability to bring enough value to your users so that they can keep coming back and use it over and over again?

And, if you get the answers to these questions you are on the right track. Always remember that people don’t use those apps, which doesn’t bring value and make life easier.
 

Engage your users

Engaging your users through different channels is one of the best ways of increasing user retention. And, if it’s done properly, you can get right returns on your efforts. Let’s discuss a couple of ways that can help you engage with your users and keep your app on top of the AppStores and among users.

 

Emails

Email campaigns are one of the most preferred ways adopted by marketers and publishers. You can send out weekly or monthly newsletters, email them notifying about new feature roll outs, campaigns, discounts, promotions, news, latest versions and upgrades you are working on. It’s not necessary that your all approaches and updates are liked by users. So, it’s a hit and try method and you need to try the different approaches and measure results to see what will work best for your app.
 

Push Notifications

Push notifications is one of the proven methods of increasing mobile app engagement among users and bringing them back. By simply and strategically pushing messages within your app you can make users remind that they have installed your app or motivate them to take specific actions. If implemented properly, it can encourage users to use your app and through the targeted messages based on behavioral data and preferences, you can send alerts and notifications about the latest updates and new versions. The entire idea here is to send the targeted and smart messages to your users, thus, providing them a viable and compelling reason to return to your app. But, Push notification is something that needs to be carefully watched out, though. As overdoing push notifications or sending out irrelevant messages to users can make them annoyed and you may feel like spam, thus resulting in deletion of your app. So, you need to carefully understand a thin line between reminding users about your app and spamming them to a point because it may lead to deletion of your app.

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