Supercharge Your App Launch: Testing, Support, Feedback, Measurements, and Strategic Communication

Launching an app is an exciting and complex process, filled with high expectations from founders, investors, and your team. The success of your launch strategies largely hinges on how you approach each step.

This article offers actionable insights to strengthen your app launch process.

Testing. A Prerequisite for Successful Launch

In this journey, testing plays a vital role. Avoid releasing a flawed product prematurely, and you will be able to prevent negative experiences that lead to detractors and safeguard your brand's reputation.

Here's a rundown of standard testing stages to ensure optimal user experience before the final release, with valuable tips and examples of publicly available services that can assist you in that:

Internal Testing

In this first stage, your in-house team would thoroughly test the app to identify and fix any issues, ensuring the core features work as intended. The team might use automated tests for basic functionalities, create a checklist of features and scenarios to test and maintain proper documentation — anything that helps ensure everything goes as intended.

For these needs, you can utilise a wide range of services, starting from Jira for bug tracking and project management, where you can document, track, and collaborate on fixing software bugs, ending with Selenium for automating web browsers and allowing for repeated and consistent testing of web applications.

Closed Testing, aka "Friends and Family"

Once your app has reached a more advanced stage, it undergoes testing with a larger yet trusted group of users. This step enables targeted feedback and helps finetune the app based on real user experiences. Here, it is vital to start by choosing users who represent diverse profiles that match your target demographic, letting them know that you value critical feedback, and providing them with a structured format or questionnaire to gather consistent and valuable insights.

At this stage, some of the tools might come in handy. Google Forms might be more than enough for quick gathering of user feedback, but you can utilise the services with broader functionality such as FeedbackFish (helps to gather user feedback with a simple embeddable widget), Typeform (a tool sharpened for creating feedback forms or questionnaires) or even UserTesting, which allows for getting video feedback from users testing your app.

Open Testing

It is the final stage before the official launch. Your app becomes available to a broad audience of innovators, facilitating extensive testing across multiple scenarios and setting the stage for market release. This audience tends to be more forgiving of potential shortcomings and actively contributes to the product evolution.

ProductHunt is a platform for product discovery that can be used for open testing to gain momentum among early adopters. Similarly, BetaList, a platform where startups can introduce their products to an eager audience for open testing, can assist you in refining the app based on actual user feedback.

Before its official 2013 release, Slack conducted rigorous testing with select companies, effectively addressing feedback and bugs. Slack sent out 8,000 invitations during its beta preview and received 15,000 new user requests, indicating high anticipation. By the end of that year, tens of thousands used Slack daily. This strategic approach to feedback and controlled release led to a 5% to 10% weekly user growth rate, resulting in a well-received and rapidly adopted product.

Feedback. After the Launch, New Reviews Go Public

Pre-launch testing aims to identify and correct errors that affect user experience. During this period, ensure app store ratings and reviews are disabled until the solution is publicly available to prevent premature public feedback.

Launching an app without adequate testing can lead to unfavourable public feedback, affecting the conversion rate from page visits to installations and organic reach. Data from Apptentive underscores the gravity of this situation, revealing that an app with a mere three-star rating loses out on 50% of potential downloads. This number deteriorates further for apps rated one to two stars. While a transition from three to four stars can still boost it by 89%.

Crucially, 90% of users deem star ratings pivotal when evaluating new apps. Given that 79% scrutinize ratings before downloading, 53% before updating, and 55% before in-app transactions, the emphasis on securing positive reviews and ratings has never been more paramount for app developers.

Hence, avoiding negative reviews and considering strategies for gaining positive feedback is essential. The ideal time to request such contributions is after a good user experience, like completing a transaction or achieving a goal. This ensures that initial feedback is positive and can attract more potential users.

Support. More Users Translate to Increased Support Demands

When planning to scale user acquisition, it is essential to anticipate the potential surge in support needs. Slow support breeds frustration and increases the likelihood of escalated measures by users, such as public criticism.

A contingency plan for anticipated or unforeseen spikes in demand helps maintain control over the quality of support provided and user satisfaction. It is essential to tackle understaffing in customer service. You can exploit knowledge bases like Zendesk Guide or Freshdesk with FAQs and step-by-step guides, along with AI-powered customer service tools like Drift and Intercom (both integrate AI-powered chatbots for immediate responses) to enhance efficiency.

The support team often uncovers user-reported navigation issues and bugs. Stay alert to the critical reasons behind support tickets and identify improvement opportunities within growing demands, fostering clear communication and regular reporting.

Measurements. What Gets Measured Gets Managed

Mapping user navigation from the outset aids in highlighting pain points, usability problems, and opportunities for product enhancement or development. Tracking conversion costs and baseline rates is vital as your optimisation starting point.

Before deploying your app, ensure that essential processes and events are accurately mapped and prompt the required information. This process aids in tracing the user's journey, which can then be optimized to enhance the overall conversion rate. For instance, refer to this chart to see the mapping opportunities in a travel booking app:

After meticulously mapping out all the significant events to monitor within your app, the next step involves establishing the criteria for effective implementation. AppsFlyer offers a comprehensive event generator tailored with recommended in-app events categorized by business vertical, ensuring you capture the most relevant data for your industry.

Once you've identified which journey stages have the most significant drop-offs or barriers, you can begin to refine or optimise them. This could involve adjusting the content or design to be more engaging or more straightforward, offering incentives to encourage movement to the next stage, or streamlining processes to remove unnecessary steps or friction.

Product analytics platforms offering real-time insights into key performance indicators are essential for tracking goals and results and sharing metrics with the team. Whether it is Amplitude*, Mixpanel, Google Analytics*, they can assist in both identifying problem areas in the funnel and tracking your aims.

Strategic Communication. Engage with Your Internal and External Audiences

When it comes to testing and launching, one of the most valuable forms of learning stems from communicating with your audience. However, this communication must be centralised, organised, and action-oriented to generate knowledge.

The team provides an initial, cost-free assessment during internal testing, allowing for diverse perspectives from technical, legal, and customer-facing teams. The same checks should be conducted when engaging with real users.

When launching a digital product, it is essential to define and communicate the channels through which these interactions should occur, whether to receive customer requests or to provide the team with a summary.

Recapping

By mapping user experience, measuring results, and valuing initial feedback, you lay a solid foundation for your app launch. Pre-launch testing, efficient support, and strategic communication set the stage for an optimised experience.

Tailoring features to align with these needs and cultivating a seamless user experience increases the odds of a triumphant launch and builds an authentic, lasting connection with your audience. What if a commonly overlooked feature could be the game-changer in your user's daily routine? The key lies in tuning into your users' voices and letting their feedback shape the evolution of your app, pushing it forward to the forefront of its niche.