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It does not matter how good your user acquisition campaign is, how well your creatives communicate your product values, how many pushes with nice copies you send to your users… If your app has poor performance, people will use it one time and never return to it.
It is actually considered the number one reason by users why they would not come back to an app. Have this in mind and let’s go through a few improvements that you can actually do in your app to improve and maintain it working perfectly, providing a great experience for all users.
The app performance is based on the launch and load times, app size, frame rate, compressing, and other factors. These words might sound a bit strange for us since we normally only know what we experience as users, which is the UX. But actually, a great performance relies on a good synergy between the front-end and also the back end.
The first impression is the one that stays the most with a user, so optimize your app to load fast. Imagine you are starving and you open a delivery app, it takes a few seconds to load the homepage, after a few more you are probably going to open the competitor's app. Even if you didn’t, your experience as a user is already damaged. If this happens in key moments of the user funnel, it is critical.
Meeting the user's expectations of app loading and responsiveness is key to providing a good experience, the faster the app loads itself and answers to the user's commands the better, every millisecond counts. Working with your team to find the right combination of clean code, compression, prioritization, and features is the key to improving this matter.
First things need to come first, so if you try to work with your developing team to load the essential items first, like the text and then the images.
Prioritize a few things to be loaded first and then a few others when the user can already interact with the app. When things are loading try not to leave your users in the dark, when your app is launching and it only appears a blank screen or a black one, this might give the user an idea that something is not right. Place a splash screen, animation, or any other content to engage the user while he waits for the app launch, like this he will not switch to other apps and he will wait until the app is fully loaded to interact with it.
Prepare your app for different network speeds, the users will not always use high-speed internet. Sometimes they will be in the subway, working in a different country, or just with a bad internet connection. They should be able to access all the features of your app everywhere, from every country, so take a look at your app and how it adapts through different network speeds and make some changes, even the smallest ones can improve the user experience and make a big difference in the user retention.
Don’t forget that the internet can be very unstable from time to time, so don't rely too much on the network performance to make your app work, because if the user loses the network, the app should have at least a few offline features so he can continue his experience without being completely interrupted.
Images are one of the main parts of any app, they are essential to the user interaction and understanding of the app.
Images take up a lot of memory and slow the downloading time if not optimized properly. It's recommended to sometimes use lower-quality images to save the memory of the user's phone and also load time, this can cost a visual fidelity, but it all comes down to what you are showing and to who.
Image compressions can work pretty well in those cases without sacrificing much image quality. Remember to have a few key images that are used in your app in several parts in the phone cache memory, so your app doesn’t need to download it every time.
Try to avoid app crashes, there is no other experience as bad as this one. When an app crashes it means that everything went wrong, it also damages the confidence of the user in the brand, how can they create trust if their own app is unreliable. Google Play and Apple Store provide great reports and statistics about the app crashes, so keep an eye on it and take it as a priority.
Statistics show that 40% of users will go to the competitor after a bad mobile experience, so optimize your app from end-to-end to have the greatest performance possible, otherwise, you will be damaging not only your user acquisition campaigns effectiveness but also the retention of your users.
Performance is not only on marketing, it is essential to be at the core of your app so it can grow, have this in mind.
