Does your product suck?
In your users eyes, your current app is your best possible app.
Question: Is your product up-to-date?
Every day, it becomes more and more obvious to consumers when the apps they use are outdated. Consumers today, more than ever, are so attuned to design. Not just visual, but useful design. It’s something that is discussed in depth on news outlets and blogs daily. Design is praised, ridiculed, and scrutinized, but most importantly, it is talked about.
Your users rely on your product being the best in your industry. So is it the best? Does it outdo the competition? Does it at least function on the latest platform, where all your users are/want to be?
Keeping your product up to date requires a lot of hard work. It means spending countless hours updating old code, revising your company’s visual language to suit new design trends, and all without compromising everything you’ve worked for thus far.
You shouldn’t have to sacrifice your principles to be relevant.
Here’s how I see it:
Every time someone interacts with your product, be it an app, your website, your back-end analytics, etc, they are directly interacting with your company. By extension, they’re interacting with your company’s brand, your CEO, and absolutely everything you stand for.
While your competitors are updating their apps, you’re lingering on someone’s home screen, untouched, unloved. When customers update their apps, even automatically, they’re seeing that you actively care to keep their phones up-to-date. When you start lagging, one week, two weeks, a month, 3 months, since your last update, you start to lose relevance and potential growth. And if, in the release notes for your update all it says is “Bug fixes”, that’s simply not good enough. The customer has no knowledge of what you’re actually fixing. They don’t know how their new version of the app is any better than the previous one, except that it now works the way it should have from day one.
One of the worst things your users can think about you is to reminisce about all the innovative things you once did, or hope to do again. I think back to some of the most innovative apps I’ve ever downloaded— they all provided unique functionality that was new and somehow important. But those fell by the wayside. They didn’t add new features that meant anything to me. So I deleted them, moved on, and found something else. If they had provided substantial product improvements, at least year-over-year, I would probably hang onto them. If possible, maybe even get users excited about your future version. But don’t promise the moon. If you can’t deliver on your promises, especially on-time, you fail.
Today, early is the new on-time.
Shipping
This all goes hand-in-hand with shipping your product. Each update should be fully polished, have undergone extensive beta and QA testing, and be bug-free. While it’s not a big deal to ship a small incremental update a few days later that fixes a few bugs, it’s also not hard to be fully prepared and ship something that’s bug-free. You have the resources at your disposal to accomplish this.
The best example of this I can provide is Q Branch’s Vesper. Every update is well thought out, carefully tested, and includes features that their target users will actually respect. No one wants a bloated app full of features that are half-baked ideas, not useful to a majority of their real users, or worse, not even functional. In fact, I seriously appreciate that they chose to go iOS7-only. They’re not actively trying to split their focus amongst their user base; they’re simply focused on providing the best experience they can.
Plan on shipping on time too. Waiting any more than 2 weeks after your competitors have updated is too long. You’re asking them to drown you. Every day that passes invites your customers to check out the competition and allow them to get comfortable with the new stuff others offer. If you plan your development timeline appropriately, you can have your best version in the app store.
Sidenote: When you update your app, you should plan on shipping a corresponding version of your website at the same time.
Your Product Can Shine
You can put your best foot forward, and you can engage your users in the way you want to. Your customers have already chosen to spend time with your product, so reward them for that by planning ahead. I absolutely promise that your customers will reward you in return. They’ll spend more time in your app; they’ll rely on you more. They may even share their awesome experience with your product with their friends.
I’m on Twitter.
