How to Increase App Downloads With the Help of User Psychology
6 easy tips to skyrocket your app downloads
Any company with an app wants the same thing. “Satisfied users?” “More revenue?” you may ask. Sure, those are important, but to reach the goals, you have to get people to download your app.
Possibly the goal would be to have more and more people installing it weekly, keeping a steady and rapidly increasing growth.
Getting to the Core of the Problem
We’d like to take the users’ point of view and map out the underlying mental steps of downloading an app.
This is more essential than you could imagine. You won’t go far without knowing your users, their needs, and wants. Tweaking the keywords is just not enough.
We’ll list steps of this process from the user’s point of view, with key steps you should pay attention to. These are paramount for reaching your ultimate goal: increasing app downloads.
It doesn’t matter how well-designed your app is, if you don’t promote, no one will download it. This is true the other way around as well:
It doesn’t matter how well promoted, marketed, and optimized your app is, if it is not well-designed, and doesn’t solve real user needs no one will download it.
How to Define App’s Value Proposition
We’ll get right into that. But let’s reflect on several questions before we make blind promises about increasing your app downloads by X percentage.
- What is the main value proposition of your app?
- Who is your target audience? Why?
- What problem of the target audience do you want to solve?
- How do you solve it?
- Why is it better than existing solutions?
- What can users get out of using your app?
Your prospective app users will ask the same questions, so it’s essential to have clear answers to all of them. Additionally, these answers should never be hidden, but very much present and easy to decode on your app download page.
How to Define the Underlying Needs
To answer the questions above, you have to explore the user’s motivations, pain points, contextual behavior, and attitudes. In other words, you might be in serious need of UX research.
You won’t know it until you ask your users and gain some insights about them, using qualitative and quantitative research methods. Everything else is just an assumption. If you want to increase your app downloads, do some research on your users’ journey and thought process.
Try to empathize with your target audience and map out what state of mind they’re already in. What agenda they have when they get in contact with your app.
You should also take care of your brand’s visuals and tone of voice. If they do not reflect your app’s true value you will have to do some branding or even a complete product redesign. Punctual and detailed UX research can help too.
Testing the Performance of The App Download Page
There are a few ways to test user’s behavior on your app download page. For instance, you can check how your app page appears in the store in a five-second test.
In this test, the screen is shown to users for five seconds, then you should ask them to create an app list they remember from the screen and explain why these applications stand out.
The five-second test can be used differently: you can ask users to list a few adjectives that come to their mind after looking at the app details page.
One more way to go is to include the discoverability and the evaluation of the app in your usability test, where you apply a think out loud protocol. It’s simple.
Don’t start with the onboarding screen, include the steps of finding, evaluating, and then installing and opening the app for the first time. You can include these steps in your prototype if you’re not testing a live app.
Using the app like users would do at home will make the test even more natural.
A User’s Journey From Basic Needs to App Download
Let’s examine a basic journey customers go through when they are searching for an app.
1. A need for a solution arise
To make things tangible, let’s go through a real-life example. A lot of people have a very common problem of not drinking enough water during the day. Certain apps could make it easy to remember how much water you consumed during the day and help to track the progress.
Those who do sport should consume twice as much water as on their regular days. This could be a problem description, where a user might go to app stores to search for a solution.
2. Choosing an app
What kind of information users would see once they open an app list in the App store? Logo, name, developer, and rating are the most important criteria.
If the name of the app is not appealing, or the rating is low, users might not even open an app for checking.
Another important aspect, users might skip the ads on the top and move on to check the organically offered apps to find the most appealing offer.
3. Getting to know what is behind the cover
Besides the information mentioned on the listing page, a user would see a description under “About this app”.
Furthermore, users could find screens or feature explanations and a video sometimes.
A short and informative video can help users evaluate if the app is what they are looking for.
If you choose to do a video, make sure it is short, informative, and visually engaging so that it holds users’ attention.
4. App ratings
Another important thing users are interested in is the rating. There is the numerical rating: how many stars did it get out of 5?
Then comes the verbal rating: what do people say about this app? It is safe to say, the bigger the better, but look at the number of downloads and the number of ratings.
Users might be positively biased towards an app with a better rating but less than a thousand downloads.
5. App look and feel
The visuals displayed on the app download page play a crucial role in the user’s decision to download an app. Why?
The way how your app works is really important, but there is the magic of the first impression where your app’s UI plays a vital role.
It has to resonate with the users on an emotional level so that they’ll find it appealing. To have a desirable look that hits the right notes with your potential users, the UI phase has to be done with the same careful precision and professionalism as the research.
6. Choosing the right app
The end of the story should be a happy one: by going through the list of apps users should decide what best suits their needs.
A good rating, the download number, great features, and last but not least, a cute logo and nice design are crucial to hook users and make them download your app.
How to Get Users to Rate Your App
One way to get positive reviews from enthusiastic and satisfied users is by sending push notifications. It has to happen at the right time. There is a general recommendation of only displaying it after more than five sessions.
However, in some cases, you need to be very careful, like in this example below where an app for logging contractions during pregnancy probably didn’t succeed in getting that positive review.
This example demonstrates how timing and the message copy can break the experience and result in missed opportunities.
Takeaways
In the end, it will come down to the main question of the user: Will this app solve my problem?
There is no point in sugar-coating it. There are millions of applications competing in the App Store and the Google Play store. It is really hard to get noticed even if you have a unique value proposition and a very well defined target audience.
This is why it is crucial to do proper user research paying attention to the mental steps and processes right from the very beginning before making your app available to the world.
A proper app’s logo, description, screenshots, and UI could attract more people to download it.
Remember, when you have boosted app downloads that is only half of the story. Then comes another half: you have to wow your users, keep them engaged, and deliver the promises you have made.
