Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Appsee

Hey, it’s me again… your loyal user. Have we met? Do you know anything about me? No? Well, if you don’t know me, how can you make more of me?

What is a loyal user? Appsee defines a loyal user as a one who has launched the app more than five times. These users are the ones who have turned your app into a part of their day-to-day; whether they launch it once a day or once a week, or whether they prefer one feature over others or use each and every one.

Analyzing your loyal user base can help you map out the features and aspects of your app that are already successful and popular, and the ones that still need work. While surveys, emails, loyalty programs, and user reviews can all reveal your users’ experience of the app, they require cooperation on the user’s part and can take a long time to collect, read, and analyze. A quick and easy-to-use solution is app analytics, especially qualitative analytics. This can include visuals and video recordings that provide a closer look at what makes loyal users come back again and again. With a qualitative app analytics tool, you can review your loyal users’ session recordings on your app just as though you were sitting with them over coffee.

Here are some methods for finding out who your loyal users are, how they use your app, and how to keep even more users coming back.

Learn how your loyal users interact with your app

If you could ask your loyal users any question, what would it be? You might want to know what your users do on the app, what their favorite features are, where they tap, and how they navigate through your app. However, your users are far away, and you probably end up asking yourself these questions. Of course, these questions lead to the ultimate question: Why?

The magic of qualitative analytics allows you to watch your loyal users in action. This shows you how they use the app and how long they spend in it — providing answers to all of your “whys”. User session recordings show exactly how each and every user experiences the app — every tap and every swipe. By looking at an analysis of each and every screen — screens with usability issues, screens with high user engagement, or screens with a high quit rate — you can see which session recordings deserve your attention. This way you can start to understand which features users love, what they’re looking for, and what keeps them engaged.

Find out what your loyal users love about you

What features do you love about your favorite app? What are the features you use every day? Are there features that you love more than others? You probably have very detailed answers to all of these questions. Similarly, these are questions that you should ask about your users and your app. Qualitative analytics can help you answer these questions. User flows and navigation paths break down each user’s journey on the app, what screens they use most, and how they get to them. In addition, touch heatmaps show what areas of each screen get the most attention and interaction. Qualitative analytics brings all of these tools to life with user session video recordings, zooming in on each user journey for a close, intimate look at your user base.

Figure out how often users interact with your app, and how

An app that is “sticky” is one that has become part of the users’ routine. A good app analytics tool will include an action cohorts feature to enable you to learn more about any user who returns to your app and performed certain actions in a given time frame. Action cohorts help you understand how often users return your app in a given time frame. If your users failed to return to your app, you can see video recordings of their sessions to gain valuable insights into user retention.

However, retention is only the tip of the iceberg for action cohorts. What about actions other than just launching the app? How many users started their onboarding, quit the app, and never came back? How often are users viewing videos on your app, or making in-app purchases? How many users started to fill their shopping cart and came back a week later to complete their purchase? With action cohorts, you can get answers to these questions, and see how the statistics change over time.

Exceed your loyal users’ expectations by proactively fixing usability issues

We’ve all experienced it before: you hear about a great app that sounds perfect for you, you download it, launch it, and it immediately starts to disappoint you with crashes, unresponsive gestures, or login screens that throw you into a loop. Even though you loved the description of the app and were eager to use it, you’ll have no choice but to give up on it and look for an alternative.

Users download your app because they want to become loyal users. From that point onwards, it’s your responsibility to make sure that your users encounter an easy, streamlined, and bug-free product, according to the principle of least effort. Otherwise, your potentially loyal users will eventually give up and abandon the app… unless you do something about it! By using a crash analytics solution and analyzing short sessions with a qualitative lens, you can figure out what is causing your loyal users to leave.

A few more thoughts

Your loyal users are like a seed from which more plants can grow. If you get to know their behaviors and their preferences, you can learn how to multiply them. Make sure to prune your app accordingly, cutting away usability issues, crashes and unresponsive gestures, so that the best features of your app can shine.

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Meet Your Biggest Fans: Loyal Users and What Keeps Them Coming Back was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Meet Your Biggest Fans: Loyal Users and What Keeps Them Coming Back

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