With the growing penetration of smartphones and technological innovations, expecting your business to grow without developing mobile apps is a pipe dream. With consumers becoming more tech-savvy, they openly embrace businesses that have mobile apps over those that do not.
Furthermore, companies are using mobile apps as a strong marketing tool to improve user experience (UX), striving to gain their trust and keep them coming back for more.
High consumer compatibility with mobile apps led many existing and emerging businesses to create their own mobile apps and sustain themselves in the highly competitive marketplace. The app market is characterized by competition of an immense scale, wherein every company tries to beat their competitors by creating apps with interactive features.
Many companies still struggle to delight their customers with their mobile apps. Reasons? There can be many. But the chief among them is the poor UX.
Now the main concern is: how do you make your mobile app stand out from the rest of the pack? Read on to know the top 5 techniques that can make your mobile app more attractive for users:
Prioritize Application Security
We all find solace in being secure, don’t we? The same goes for users who are more likely to use a mobile app if it provides secure navigation and enhanced security. Security in reference to mobile apps is highly critical as these apps are storehouses of sensitive information like passwords, pins, or other personal/financial information.
Without a strong security perimeter around these apps, hackers can gain access to this sensitive information and exploit it for their bad motives. However, there are multiple ways to install effective and efficient AppSec (application security) that not only provide data safety but also increase the popularity of your application.
First, you need to install encryption methods like an SSL certificate on your mobile app so that when users enter their crucial information, it remains intact and encrypted. It will prevent hackers from accessing private data like passwords or credit card numbers, thus increasing the trust of the users.
Second, you should implement two-factor authentication for login IDs and passwords and ensure encryption occurs before transmitting data over Wi-Fi networks and cellular networks. This would mean every time someone tries to access their account with any of these methods. There will be an extra layer of security built into their accounts, like sending them codes directly through text messages.
Ensure Frictionless Onboarding
Onboarding is a deciding factor that can help you either gain customers’ confidence or lose them before they explore other features. This is because frictionless onboarding helps the users get the most out of your app without having to spend too much time.
If users find a mobile app onboarding complex, they will not think twice before abandoning the app in just a few seconds. The improved onboarding experience is thus the key to unlocking users’ engagement and retention.
There are some proven techniques to enhance mobile UX, which motivate users to continue using apps again and again. Creating an easy-to-understand tutorial about how the app works and what features it contains is an excellent strategy for the smooth onboarding process.
Time is money. Companies need to keep reminding themselves of this adage if they would like to earn customers during onboarding. Simplifying the time-consuming login process would mean better UX and onboarding, which, in turn, means customer retention and more earnings.
Simplify Navigation
With easy navigation, app usability increases dramatically, and users get the opportunity to explore all the features. However, users struggle to enjoy every feature if the app suffers from poor navigation, forcing them to quit before they start. These factors highlight the importance of navigation, which thus becomes a high-priority task for every app owner.
Avoiding clutter can be an effective strategy to streamline navigation in the mobile app. Developers need to leave every element that is unnecessary for the UX, deleting any clutter the user interface and design might have.
One of the important ways to simplify the navigation is ensuring that there are not too many buttons or options for users. The fewer buttons an application has, the easier it will be for users to get around in-app. If you want people to use your application regularly, ensure they can easily navigate through all of its features while also getting what they are looking for.
Publish Outstanding Content
Content is king. You might have heard this saying if you have been in the marketing world for a while. In fact, it is quite true as authentic and engaging content never fails to convert users into loyal customers. By publishing digestible content on your mobile applications, you keep users’ excitement alive and enable them to stay informed about the latest trends and information.
Blogs are the most popular type of content that enables you to engage with your customers and increases your chances of success by promoting your products and services. If done right, you can reap multiple benefits from blogging. You can easily repurpose your mobile blogs to share them on social media platforms, like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest – enabling you to spread the word about products and services to a large and different audience.
Moreover, mobile apps often promote a product or service. Hence, all the crucial product information should be assembled in one place, which allows users to get desired product information in a concise manner. You can include features and benefits in the product description so that users feel motivated to buy a product or subscribe to a service.
Focus On Personalization
With personalization, users get a more engaging experience. In the digital world where customers have become choosy, companies prefer to provide deals and experiences tailored to customers’ needs, locations and preferences to gain a competitive edge.
A mobile app can have hundreds of thousands of users, making it difficult for app owners to personalize the design and features as per every user. In such a case, developers can leverage data analytics to dive deep into users’ behavior. Using data analytics, developers can gather only the relevant data, enabling them to adapt and change their strategy of personalization.
Providing a personalized interface to users by including their names on the screen could be another effective strategy. This not only delights users but also makes them think about how much you, as an app owner, think and care about them. By taking into account users’ preferences, you can display only tailored content for every user to maximize the desirability of the mobile app.
Wrapping Up
The main takeaway from this is that it’s all about your user experience (UX). You need to put yourself in the shoes of your users and take the right steps toward designing an app that will be useful, desirable, and easy to use.
As you can see from these five tips, there is a lot that goes into making an app more desirable for users. Fortunately for us, industry professionals have already figured out that these tips work if we take users into account at every stage of app development.
There could be many tips that can make your mobile apps more desirable. However, tips such as prioritizing application security, ensuring frictionless onboarding, simplified navigation, publishing outstanding content and focusing on personalization can help you stand out from the crowd.
Lastly, businesses need to constantly monitor users’ in-app behavior and suggestions to continue improving their app design and interface and meet the end goal of providing the desirable user experience.