You’re building something awesome… right?
Lately I’ve been struck by how often I read “obviously it’s important to build something awesome” in content about marketing and growing your app revenue.
Whether it’s on Quora, the 101 blogs the Appbot team and I follow, Growth Hackers, Medium the message is the same. Almost invariably the author then turns their attention to some (often very useful) tactical or strategic point of advice — something tangible like the business cases for charging for your app up front vs offering in-app purchases.
I’ll admit I’ve done it too… Why? Simply because “building something awesome” can mean such a wide variety of things depending on what type of app you’re building, and the characteristics of the users in your target audience. The good news is that there are some techniques that apply across all verticals…
It seems to be generally accepted that it’s highly unlikely that you’re going to be able to grow your app business if your product sucks. I agree (in almost all cases), but it also seems to be really hard to come by practical suggestions on how to make your product “more awesome”.
With that in mind I’m going to have a crack at offering some detailed tactical advice on how you can find ways to progress from OK to better to rock-star-awesome via the shortest possible route. I’m going to focus on HOW you can make sure you’re building a great app that users love by listening to your customers and aggregating the feedback they give you.
Where do I look for customer feedback?
Make a list of the places you engage with your own app customers & users right now. The list might be something like this (or a subset of these things):
- your user reviews in each of the app stores you sell in
- your company and/or personal Twitter account
- you company Facebook page
- other social media channels you’re active on such as YouTube, or if you make a B2B app perhaps LinkedIn groups or company pages.
- online forums that relate either to your product specifically (if you have a help/support forum), or the type of product more generically (like gaming forums)
- Quora
- your blog, in the comments, or Medium if that’s your main content platform
- popular app review websites
- any blogs that have written about your app
- feedback and support emails (probably in your helpdesk software, if you have it)
What am I looking for amongst the customer chatter?
My experience is that you often uncover findings you don’t expect when you do this exercise, but in general these are the things I am always on the lookout for:
1) Identifying the “wow” moments in your app
Users don’t always LOVE the features we expect them to love (bummer :( ). The features and benefits we highlight both within our apps and in our app store names, descriptions, previews and screenshots usually focus on the benefits we prioritize, but if you can identify the things that your customers repeatedly rave about you’ll be able to expose those “wow” moments more prominently.
Where to lookWhat to look forCheck your 4 & 5 star reviewsRepetition of comments about a feature or outcome in the appFilter your reviews to view those containing positive words like “great”, “awesome” and “love”Repetition of comments about a feature or outcome in the appTweets or Facebook posts about features or outcomesPosts with super high engagement (note, you probably won’t see lots of posts about the same feature, people tend to engage with other’s positive comments rather than write their own on social media)The YouTube channel where you host your help videosVideos that have high views and/or many positive comments — what feature or outcome do these videos focus on?
Here’s an example… Wahoo Fitness’ 7 Minute Workout has a huge amount of positive feedback to harvest. There are a lot of 5 star reviews that say things like “easy to use” and “awesome” — not enormously actionable feedback since so many apps claim to be “easy to use” and “awesome”! Dig one layer deeper though and you’ll see there’s a specific feature that users rave about repeatedly. Sadly, it’s not usually in the headline of their reviews….
Notice how these are all very positive reviews, but how none of the headlines gave us a clue as to why these users loved the app. You can put this info to good use to drive
- more downloads
- more 5 star reviews
but there are a few other key things to check for before we get onto that :)
What if you don’t find any latent “wow” moments? Fear not, Stu talks a bit about creating them here.
2) Find (and fix) your bugs and UI issues
There is both good news and bad news here.
I’m a bad news first kinda person so we’ll start with that: UI issues can be trickier to uncover and (very painfully) sometimes relate to features you thought your users would have kittens over (in a good way!).
The good news is that bugs and crashes are pretty straightforward if you use the Appbot Sentiment Dashboard. Here’s a quick overview of where to look and what to look for when you’re hunting down bugs and UI issues:
Where to lookWhat to look forCheck your 1 and 2 star reviewsCustomers repeatedly complaining about the same action causing a crash, or about some frustration they have with the UI.Filter reviews for words like “bug”, “crash” and “error” (hint: the Sentiment Dashboard makes this really quick: we aggregate mentions of these words at the bottom of the Word Cloud)Filtering for these words can uncover not only bugs themselves, but also UI issues which users often perceive to be bugs especially if your target market is quite technically minded.Your helpdesk softwareAgain, filter for words like “crash” or “bug” as a quick way to find the relevant tickets.Your support forum if you have oneOften a slower approach if you’re not regularly the person fielding comments on your forum, but can be very fruitful especially if you have any functionality allowing users to +1 or upvote posts. If you are lucky enough to have them, engage your support team’s help to speed things up. You’re looking for posts that often start with the words “why can’t I…” or “It would be good if”.
Here’s an example of a UI issue we uncovered in app reviews:
After reading through 20 or so 1 and 2 star reviews for the WSJ app we noticed that many users referenced the “refresh” feature of the app. For illustrative purposes I drilled into reviews containing the word “refresh”, for the current version only. This filtered search returned 2 pages of results, and made this particular UI issue easy to spot:
These are a small selection of complaints about the same problem. It’s important to note that this issue is only obvious because we’ve narrowed search results to focus on something we saw recurring in a larger sample of negative reviews. Whilst this looks super obvious in the example above you shouldn’t be expecting to see this kind of repetition staring you in the face when you look at any set of reviews for your app. Find something you think looks like a pattern and drill in. Another way to do this is by using the Word Cloud on the Appbot Sentiment Dashboard, after you filter for 1 or 2 star reviews.
3) Surface frequent feature requests — especially those with a quick, elegant solution
Searching for feature requests can be done in almost exactly the same way we searched for UI issues above. I find Twitter and Facebook are also useful places to look in the case of feature requests, in addition to your forum and helpdesk software. When looking at user feedback on social media remember that it’s engagement that matters, not repetition.
Here’s an example I noticed recently on the Slack Twitter feed:
The level of engagement (engagement = (retweets + favourites)/total followers) with this post is approximately double the regular level for Slack… Worth paying attention to, and perhaps a feature Slack should consider building in :)
4) See which elements require frequent support or better explanation
You’ll be able to surface the things users find hard to use by looking at almost any of the sources I listed under “Where do I look for customer feedback?” above, but I find review blogs can be a good place to start so that you can drill into running the right searches and reports in your reviews, helpdesk software and support forums quickly. In my experience, reviewers will often focus on things that they find a challenge, so searching for some of the keywords or phrases they use can speed things up.
Whilst you go through this exercise it’s important to remember that a sample set of n=1 is not particularly useful, so be sure to use bloggers’ and journalists’ comments as a source of places to start your search, then verify that the demand for better support or explanation is actually there with data a larger sample of your real users.
What do I do with this information?
That depends on what you found, of course. Here are some of the practical applications we find for each of the pieces of information you’ve uncovered:
1) You found a “wow” moment you didn’t know was so “wow”…
Feels good, hey? There are people out there that love what you’ve built, yay! Once you and your team have given each other a round of high fives here are a few recommendations to help you put the “wow” to good use:
- Highlight this feature in the navigation of your app, or your onboarding workflow if you have one — your goal is to get all users to encounter it as soon as possible after they download the app and open it for the first time.
- Draw prospect users’ attention to the feature in your app description and screenshots in the app stores
- Add some social sharing to the “wow” moment — it is easiest to get user to wax lyrical about your app when they’ve just done or seen something awesome for the first time
- Ask users for a review at that same point — chances are it will be positive.
2) You found a bug or a UI issue that a bunch of people have mentioned
First of all, if it’s just the one then that’s pretty awesome! I think the answer to this question is pretty obvious if it’s a bug that you’ve uncovered, but if it’s a UI problem then I’d suggest engaging with your customers if you can to find out what behaviour they’d prefer. We re-published an awesome post by Paul Mayne on doing just this, check it out for some tips to get you closer to your users.
3) You found features (lots of) people are asking for
We all know it’s not as simple as “just go build those things”… You’ll usually be doing battle with a jammed-up roadmap if you want to build something new. Without heading off on a tangent too much, I suggest you think about these points to help you prioritize the things you’ve uncovered against the things you already planned to build:
- See if your competitors have the feature. If not, can you build it relatively quickly (or some small MVP version of it)? This feature could become a valuable point of difference for you, but be disciplined about how much time you spend on the first cut of it.
- Is it aligned with your core purpose in the app? If not, think twice. Disparate features are harder to work into your navigation and workflows, and also much harder to market.
4) There are recurrent patterns in your support requests
This one’s fun if you’re like me and you enjoy writing help docs and FAQs. I view these things as opportunities to improve your scalability and your customers’ experiences simultaneously — how glorious! Consider these ideas:
- put some FAQs in your app
- beef out your help docs
- integrate an in-app support product
- add this feature to your onboarding workflow in the app
What if I don’t have enough customer feedback to reveal patterns?
Yep, this can be a big challenge when your app is newly released, or simply isn’t getting the volume of downloads (and therefore reviews and other good stuff) you hoped for. In my view the way to address this are by prompting reviews and leveraging your competitors… It’s a topic in itself, and Stu recently wrote something about it here that I recommend you read. Maybe we’ll write more on it another time, there’s certainly plenty to say.
I’d love to know what you guys think of this post, so please tweet me and let me know, or just share this if you’ve found it useful. Thanks for reading!
