On mobile, growing your active user base can be tough since about 80% of all app users fade within 90 days of download. Too often the app creators ask the question “How do I grow faster and acquire more users?” when they should be asking how to create a better in-app experience to retain users. After all, “if the user can’t find the product, the user can’t buy the product.” This is what makes user testing such a valuable asset.

Consumers have come to expect a certain level of experience and discoverability akin to that of Facebook or Netflix. What these two companies have in common is their ability to consistently experiment and launch new features. Netflix notes in its technology blog that “every product change Netflix considers goes through a rigorous A/B testing process before becoming the default user experience.”

Apptimize, a mobile application optimization company that offers A/B testing, feature toggling, phased rollout, and analytics, discovered that apps that conduct experiments with eight or more new features per year grow at a rate over two times as fast as apps with slower and less innovative development cycles. Testing out things like onboarding and conversions are great ways to improve the user experience.

Vevo, the world’s leading all premium music video and entertainment platform, tested out their onboarding to find that they had a significant amount of initial drop-offs when signing into the app. They found that by reducing the tutorial from 4 screens to two, that they were able to retain 6% more users.

This example just goes to show the importance of user testing. When design flaws become usability problems, they often become profitability problems. Tools such as A/B testing, click testing, and usability testing are an integral part of app development and should never be overlooked.

 

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/navigation-ia-tests/

https://martechseries.com/video/video-marketing/why-mobile-growth-is-actually-about-retention-how-optimizing-in-app-experience-leads-to-2x-faster-growth/