How to Turn Your App Users from Naughty to Nice

During the holiday season, it is not just department stores and online retailers that feel the benefits of the holiday rush. In fact, app download rates receive a merry boost at this time of year.

Yet even though more downloads happen during this season, there are also more reviews. Reviews and ratings from app users can have major implications on an app’s success. In fact, an increase from two to four stars can translate into a 540 percent increase in download rate. Moreover, it can be difficult to garner positive reviews, since app users are more likely to share their opinion if they have a negative experience than if they have a positive one. This is why prioritizing your app’s UX is critical for winning more promoters than detractors. After all, you don’t want your user’s expression to go from a smile to an evil smirk.

App makers need to provide the best user experience to ensure they are attracting more nice users and 5-star reviews. There are many reasons why users turn “naughty” and give an app a lump of coal in the ratings stocking. Below, we will cover the top three causes of naughty users and bad reviews and how to make them nice utilizing a few of Appsee’s unique features.

Frequent/Unresolved Crashes

When apps crash, it can be very frustrating. Users lose time, work and may even lose their faith in the app all together. Can somebody say, “Delete?” Therefore, it is critical for developers to identify and troubleshoot crashes quickly. Fixing crashes can be challenging, since apps and their environments are becoming more complex. Couple this with increasing user expectations and decreasing patience, and developers need help.

This is where crash tools that automatically detect, record, and symbolicate crashes can save the day. Instead of scouring through crash logs trying to understand what happened, developers can use crash video recordings to witness the issue and sequence of events first hand. No more guesswork - which means more time to focus on actually solving the problem and making your users happier. Furthermore, because developers can correlate each crash with a distinct user ID, they can better help their support teams quickly reach out to users before they become naughty and write bad review.

Example of crashed session recording via Appsee.

Weak User Interface

There are many design elements that can contribute to a poor UX. A few common issues are counterintuitive menus, unresponsive gestures, odd navigation flow and confusing buttons. Moreover, Apple rejects 6% of apps submitted to the App Store just for poor design alone.

Designers can use touch heat maps for UI optimization and troubleshooting. By leveraging touch heatmaps, designers can learn which areas of a screen users find interesting, which action buttons are being ignored or are confusing to the user, and where unresponsive gestures occur. Touch heatmaps track all the gestures within an app and show which gestures are performed in every screen. They can also recognize the distinct differences between a tap, pinch, and swipe on the screen. This is powerful information that can help drive user interface improvement. Read more about touch heatmaps here.

Poor Performance and Usability

Sometimes apps just perform poorly or are difficult to use. Unlike crashes or bugs, app performance can often times be more difficult to determine. Some examples of poor performance and usability include slow loading time, screen errors, freezing and incomplete user-initiated tasks. Specifically, one major reason for sluggish apps is that memory usage is not optimized during the testing phase.

By leveraging user session recordings, developers can identify user frustration zones and resolve them effectively. These recordings can also help developers determine key user behavior elements such as: why users might abandon registration, how loyal users use an app, and why users quit an app. Understanding these things can help app developers create an enhancement strategy and take any app to the next level.

Final Words

Ultimately, app users are not innately “naughty”; rather it’s the app itself that can be the bad influence. App makers need to focus on continual improvements to the different facets of the user experience, in order to prevent igniting frustration and subsequently poor reviews from app users. Qualitative analytics platforms can certainly help app makers achieve an optimal UX, stay ahead of potential issues, and maintain nice users.

‘Tis the season for nicer app users, so start your free 14-day Appsee trial before your users become the Grinch.

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