Top 6 Metrics used to measure app success

Most customers from all segments of society and the financial status world over have one thing in common today. They all own a mobile phone and not just any mobile phone but a smartphone. It is no surprise that mobile phone users are using applications for an increasing number of tasks whether it is booking an airline, planning an itinerary, paying an outstanding bill or taking an academic course online. Businesses today, therefore, find it important to have their presence and reach out to customers and users through an application.

While the idea of having an application for your market offering and developing one is exciting, opportune and somewhat easy with good and experienced application development partners, the challenging part is to ensure it is long-lasting, relevant and effective. What then are some of the criteria that you should keep in mind to ensure that your application meets its desired goals?

Well done is half begun they say, so here are some measures of success for your application that will guarantee your application goes a long way.

• Relevance and Utility: Must be certain that the application solves a certain requirement that your users have and helps them solve problems. Be sure to take feedback from users at periodic intervals to keep your application connected, relevant and updated for your target segment. With a plethora of applications available in the market to solve similar problems, the initial excitement for your users may wear off quickly. At that time utility will be the stickiness factor for your customers with your application.

• Reliability: Frequent crash of applications in the first few minutes of usage is not uncommon, especially when it is developed without proper testing for reliability. The application must be tested across different devices several times before final launch to check for its dependability in all respects.

• Security: With extremely important and confidential data such as health information, social profiles, location data, and financial details being available and transferred through applications, security is a definite must. Locally stored data should be appropriately encrypted and security measures must be taken for communication and transfer between the device and the servers. Care must be taken for no external leakage of data.

• Simple, Attractive and User-friendly: Everyone loves attractive colors and a beautiful layout in the application but the most important aspect is a well-structured and well laid out application that is simple to figure out and easy to navigate. Logical flows for navigation, the right sized buttons, tabs, and easily readable text are just a few of the elements.

• Compatibility with different platforms: With both Android and iOS applications being equally popular amongst users, your application must be compatible with at least both of these platforms so as to enable its reach to a wider audience.

• Legally Compliant: All legal requirements in terms of documentation and time should be checked for and approvals should be received prior to launch. This will avoid unnecessary delays and lead to smooth launch, functioning, and activity of the application.

While the above strategic points would certainly take your application a long way, there are certain other executional and day-to-day in-app performance measures that can make or break the relationship with your users. These are

• Time of availability: A reliable application would be available to its users through the day and night and they would be able to access it with equal ease and efficiency at any point in time.

• Time to First Byte: This is the time taken by the application to respond to a request from the user. It also indicates the amount of time it takes to get a response from its servers in the back end.

• Time to React: This is the time that the application takes to complete a particular task instructed by the user. For example, the speed at which a cab is booked, the amount of time it takes to complete an online payment.

• Load Time: This is the difference between the time that your user first loads the application or clicks on your application and the number of (typically) seconds that pass before he is able to start using the application. It also indicates the response time taken by various tasks within the application.

All this apart, with advancements in technology and analytics, there are ways by which you can measure the success of your application and where it stands in the face of competition. These are

• Acquisition: How many new customers did your application acquire in a given time period. I.e. those who downloaded or installed your application.

• Activeness: While many users download an application, not all of them use it actively. The rate and time of usage for an application reduce significantly after the first few days. Therefore, activeness is the number of active users of your application in a given period.

• Retention: With at least 05 to 07 applications installed on their phones, an increasing number of applications get downloaded and installed by the users but most of them are deleted after the initial curiosity is gone. Therefore, the key is to put your effort in retaining the existing customers. Retained customers are those who stay with your application or reactivate their engagement with and activities through the application after a certain time period.

• Quality Metrics: Finally, quantifiable metrics such as run speed and other technical metrics are available that help measures customer satisfaction and the quality of your application. Quality and performance measurement metrics are available to help analyze app success from both the performance point of view and customer engagement perspective.

If you are looking to build a mobile application to solve a consumer, business problem, do get in touch with us at info@iviewlabs.com