The 4 Pillars of Mobile Apps

With about 14 bn app downloads from the iPhone app store alone, one thing is obvious - the market for Mobile Apps is here to stay. Gartner estimates the total mobile app downloads since 2008 to reach 185 bn in 2014. It is becoming increasing important for marketeers and product managers to understand the basic things that make a mobile app successful.

Here are the 4 pillars which are crucial to create a successful mobile strategy for any company. I am not explaining any of these in detail since that will take several long posts. The objective of this post is to give you some Food For Thought - what to think about when you decide on your mobile app strategy??

1) User Experience and Design

The small screen real-estate makes this one of the most important thing for a mobile device.
This starts from a high level overview - understanding the main features for your target user, using metaphors for design and creating the main app flow and the side flows - to getting into very specific details like managing user data entry well - should it be a keyboard or keypad or scroll wheel/ picker? When will the app sue swipe v/s flick v/s pinch? What alerts, action sheets, tool bars will be used? Apple HCI Guidelines explain some of these very well. Here are some more details.

2) Application Performance

This is the software that runs the app. Most crashes of app happen due to mismanaged memory. It is important to ensure the iPhone memory is managed properly. What features work when the app is offline? What information needs to be cached - when the app is pulled from the background v/s when a new instance is charged? How important is data security? Do the API calls need to be asynchronous? There are many more such questions which need to be answered to help create a great performing app.


3) Monetization

The decision to make the app free or paid is a difficult one, yet very important to an app's acceptance in the market. With the new trends of Freemium apps, this becomes even more confusing.

Options - Free always!! (with or without ads) OR Freemium with in-app purchase for subscription or lite version OR Freemium with in-app purchase for virtual goods OR Paid

Some things to consider - how do you compare to competition? (If you are far better then you can charge a premium provided you have some marketing budget to get the word out there and to make the app viral). Is the app more for a branding experience and hence needs to be free? Is your user base big enough to make adding ads sensible? (tip: If its not, don't spoil the user experience for a few dollars everyday)

4) Analytics


Last but not the least, this is the feedback loop to track your app success. What are your engagement and retention metrics looking like? How many new users are you adding? How many sessions and what is the session length? How many repeat users do you have? What demographics does your app cater to? How do these metrics compare against those for competition? With companies like Flurry, this process has become less complex than what it seems. Read more on the need for analytics here.

Feel free to post any questions you have on this.

Deciding on the Revenue Model for your Mobile App

When deciding between a ‘free’ ad-supported business model and a 'paid' app business model consider these things:

1) Compare the revenue for both the models by doing the following anaylysis

• Crunch the number to estimate the revenue you think you can get per user on a free vs. paid model - estimate the number of impressions you’ll get per day (or week) per user for your ad model v/s how much you plan to sell your app for
  
• Consider the number of users you think you can realistically get with each.
• Ensure you estimate the reasonable growth rate. It will be a while before you can get a million users

2) If you’re leaning towards a free, ad-supported model, make sure it’s scalable for you to support marketing and business development

3) If you want to have a free, ad-supported model but the numbers in 2 above make it unaffordable, consider whether a 'freemium' model would work for you

4) If you feel your app is far better than other apps out there, don't be afraid to charge for it. However, be prepared to invest in marketing and add some major viral elements.

Basic things to remember when Designing or Developing for iPad

*Source: Morgan Stanley

Tablets penetration in the market is still small, however it is seeing a strong growth. The trends for the tablets market cannot be ignored and need to be kept in mind when designing or developing for them.

While many people thought this will replace the mobile devices, that is not necessarily true.

1. Trading Home Computer Time for iPad Time
- Its replacing the web surfing on your Laptop. According to a Neilsen survey 70% of tablet owners and 68% of smartphone owners said they use their devices while watching television.

2. Tablet is a Shared Device
- Family members share an iPad at home and hence usually use one login for various apps or accounts. This misrepresents user analytics and user cases.

3. Sharing of Tablets raises security concerns
- When you leave your iPad on your Coffee Table and have guestes over, who browse your iPad, this becomes super critical.

4. Expect exception App And Website Experience
- When browsing the Web, users expect to access the full version of websites, so ensure that your site is optimized to deliver a great experience on the iPad. At the same time, the apps need to leverage the bigger screen and specially the split screen view of the screen (over an iPhone)

Explaining the UX Value

UX means more than just the product interface; it encompasses the whole experience a person will have with a brand and their overall satisfaction with a product. A solid UX design process begins with with discovery and ends with development integration, relying heavily on stories and prototypes in between.

It is the role of the UX designer to demonstrate the value that UX work brings to a product. Here are a few steps which the UX designer can follow to help communicate the value more effectively to all the stakeholders in a company and hence improve the user experience for the customer:

1) Identify Key Business Objectives
To communicate the value proposition, you need to understand the project strategy. You should also get these validated with your other stakeholders like - team members, customers and end users. Understand the objectives and document them for future use.

Examples for an e-commerce mobile app:
1. Move users from website towards mobile app
2. Increase conversion rates from start to checkout
3. Increase overall customer satisfaction with product discoveries

2) Identify the UX attributes

List down the UX attributes which will influence the success of the key objectives. Its important to remember that not every key objective is influenced by UX design. Also remember not to overlook how UX may subtly impact the objectives.

The UX attributes that should be considered in a project include:
Usability: Who is the target audience and what is their expectation of usability? (Eg: Is it for preschool kids, high school kids or architects?)
Accessibility: On which devices with the app be used by the target audience?
Performance: How well does the application need to perform? How fast does it need to load and respond to input? Should this require additional sreens/ buttons / user input points?

Simple descriptions of how these attributes influence the key objectives are sufficient. Building on our earlier example:

1. Migrate users from website towards mobile app
a. Usability equivalent or better than website (Eg: Amazon mobile app has a better user experience that the Amazon mobile website)
b. Usability of app different mobile devices
c. Performance of app must feel quick and responsive to user input
2. Increase conversion rates from splash page to checkout
a. Find products quickly and easily
b. Trade off between number of clicks to purchase v/s amount of information on each screen
c. Simple and easy to use checkout pages (Eg. Entering or storing CC information)



3) Identify the current success of these UX attributes
For each of the UX attributes you've defined, assign a rating or assessment to the current state of each. Rate them from Poor to Excellent (on a scale from o to 10)

4) Identify the high priority items

UX can get tricky when trying to achieve multiple objectives. Hence identify the high priority items to ensure those features are not compromised

5) Identify the desired state of these UX attributes

Determine to what level each of the identified attributes needs to be improved. Some items need to be imrpovized slightly while some others may need to be excellent to fit the business objectives.

6) Identify the activities and design work that can be done to improve the state of the UX

A plan can be made for how to improve those higher priority attributes from the current state to the desired state.

When the value proposition of UX is directly associated with key business objectives, it is much easier to have quality discussions about time and budget for UX activities. Helping your stakeholders understand how UX directly and indirectly influences their key business objectives allows you to focus more time on critical work and might help you increase the budgets and time you are allocated for UX initiatives.

Comparing Mobile Analytics Solutions

In my previous post I explained the important of using Mobile Analytics in mobile apps. This post compares some of the popular solutions available in this category along with my suggestion for.

Google Analytics
Google Analytics enables you to track performance by downloading the SDK and use it to get traffic insight on iPhone, iPod Touch and Android application platforms.

Google Analytics SDK allows you to rule which view or what part of your application view will trigger a page view. Google suggests that you trigger at least one pageview, and do it at the point the app loads, if you want Google Analytics to track Unique Visitors.

Admob
Admob has made a simple to implement mobile analytics solution. You can track visitors, site usage, traffic source and mobile goals that you create in AdMob administration section. You can track the effectiveness of advertising campaigns from advertising partners that you work with, get detailed information regarding the referring sites and keywords which your visitor came from, analyze Pageview, bounce rate, downloads, etc.
Further, Admob ads can be integrated.

Flurry
Flurry provides real-time app usage statistics for developers who need a single mobile app analytics platform, that will allow them to get app usage insight, how the app performs on different handsets and allows them to watch advanced reports to increase retention and grow their user base for the app shelf-life

If you have a multi-platform mobile app, you can use Flurry on many types of devices, whether you deploy your app for Apple iPhone, Android device, Blackberry or JavaME and others coming soon. The offering is free.

AppCircle can be integrated for ads.

Webtrends mobile Analytcis
This is a robust and flexible product, which allows mobile website owners and apps developers to get in-depth data analytics of their app/website usage. It gives you the advantage to monitor, track and analyze real-time usage data and measure every metric that can possibly be measured for both apps and mobile websites.

There are also some other companies like Bango which provide advanced analytics however they are not free to use.

If you are on considering analytics for Mobile apps, I highly recommend Flurry. It is very user friendly and provides a sea of analytics which are more than what you need to made those crucial decisions. Besides this, it is absolutely Free!

The other main benefits of Flurry are:

• Mobile app usage insight
• Analyze app performance on different handsets
• Who uses the application?
• What are the most useful feature in your app?
• Check users’ loyalty
• Users by country , time and customer segment
  
• Average session usage session length

The Need for Mobile Analytics

The important of Metrics for feedback cannot be over-emphasized. Its like the basic feedback loop in circuits, appraisals for employees, Balanced scorecard in companies and more recently web and mobile analytic in the digital era.

The Growing Mobile App Market

Gartner estimates the mobile app downloads to touch 17.7 bn in 2011. As the mobile apps market grows tracking what users are doing on these 17.7 bn downloaded apps becomes of prime importance to advertisers, marketeers and big brands. The sale of Smart Phones and Tablets is also estimated to surpass the Desktop and Notebook PC sales in 2011 by Morgan Stanley. Hence there was no better time to start monitoring the mobile app usage in additional to analyzing behavior on the web.

Mobile Analytics

While various tools are available for mobile analytics. I have found Flurry to be highly useful. The platform lets you track the number of new users across time, geography and customer segments along with active users, session lengths and number, frequency of use and retention. Moreover they compare your data with genre averages to help you get a better sense of where you stand in the segment.

These metrics can be combined to derive more important results like analyze customer segments across demographics to help devise and improve both your product and marketing strategy.


This also helps the relevant placement of advertisements and putting the high yield ads in the more frequented mobile app screens.

Challenges

• Mobile app analytics has some basic challenges compared to the web analytics, due to the nature of the mobile platform. A considerable amount of mobile application usage happens when no network is available. As a result, analytics data has to be stored locally on the device and reported later.
• Apps are downloaded onto the phone as opposed to a website where the content is all dynamic. This requires the analytics to be finalized before app release, because you can't change the tracking points once it's downloaded, unlike the web where its all dynamic
• Data overload can also become an issue. You need to know what you want to track and how you want to use the data for interferences so that you do not get overwhelmed.
• One frequent argument against all the data collection is that it discloses sensitive user data. Hence you should always ensure that you take the user's permission before capturing such data.
  

Mobile Gaming - The Freemium Way

A recent study by Flurry indicates that on an average iOS and Android Freemium Games generate $14 revenue using their Freemium model.

The rise of the Freemium mobile games has given some tough competition to Nindento DS and Sony PSP. an avid Freemium game player becomes so engaged in the game, that the usual $0.99 iPhone app threashold no longer bars him from a $9.99 purchase or in some cases even a $50 purchase (which is how much many of the game CDs for the PSP and DS sell for).

The Freemium model which has earlier been used by many big Web companies, as highlighted in my earlier post, is here to stay and rule the mobile gaming industry. It should come as no surpise that game drive 75% of revenue generated among the top 100 grossing iOS apps, of wihch 65% were generated from freemium games. Again, the crux of this model remains udnerstanding the customer segment and their needs to correctly decide the offerings in in-app purchase and price them right to induce purchase.

The 'Freemium' model

The "Freemium" business model for apps - in which apps offer some services for free, incentivizing users to try an app before paying for additional features is becoming more and more common in the top grossing apps on the various mobile app stores. The primary source of income for many freemium apps is in-app downloads.

A recent study by Flurry found that mobile phone games which are free to download, are actually making more money than those that charge.

Many companies let you download apps for free, rather than asking $0.99 to download a game you have never tried. when you become an passionate player, they you into paying quite a bit more than $0.99 for in-game virtual goodies like farm crops or power boosters. In June 2011, among the top 100 games in the iTunes store, free games generated almost twice as much revenue as games that charged to download.

The Freemium Business Model

The word “freemium” may be less than four years old, but the business model it describes – offering basic service access for free and then charging for advanced features – has been around for decades and is utilized by some of the Web’s most successful companies.

The working: Everyone gets your product or service for free, forever. But those customers who really like it, and find most value in it, will have a strong temptation to upgrade to a “premium” service which has lots of additional goodies and come at a price. It is a strategy for pricing by customer segmentation. It also requires a lot of insight into your customers and how they use your product to know what you want to giv for free to entice your user yet ensure you have some core features available for the paid versions.

Examples

Pandora - Since its launch in 2005, the company known for giving away “free” music to users has expanded to 20 million unique visitors. In 2009, it brought in $50 million in revenue – all the while as a freemium business

Skype- The popular internet calling service is free for those millions of customers who use it just to call or videochat between two computers anywhere in the world. Skype only charges if you want to use it to call a landline phone.

Some more examples include Flickr, Dropbox, Evernote, Spotify and recently announced Apple's iCloud music service.

With a high conversion rate and its ability to create an incredibly loyal audience, freemium has become a cornerstone of many successful startups and is definitely worth considering before you decide you pricing and go-to market strategy. But beware, not all Freemium products actually break even.