How to tell users about an App Update

Applications have frequent updates, and the way the value of these updates is presented is very important. We think that product teams have experienced this more than once and that an article about our experience could be useful. At Flo, we found a unique way to tell users about product updates and saw an increase in trial subscriptions as a result. Here’s our story.

How users find out about updates

We’re accustomed to thinking of a product update as nothing more than a list of what’s changed about the product. It’s typically a succession of screens, each showing some part of the update. An updated user interface is typically presented in a video or animation piece.

Let us take Apple as an example of what a standard product update looks like:

• The interface is on-screen.
• The header contains a CTA.
• The text tells the user how to use and where to find the different functionality.

This looks good, and we used the same approach.

The example below shows how we advertised a new training course and the addition of a search option on our content library.

You can do even better!

Our passion to make things even better impelled us to restack the customary What’s New functionality. We decided to test our theory using both a qualitative audience survey (UX testing) and a set of metrics.

The metrics were in place to track the idea’s success or failure

We decided that our key metric would be the new subscription rate among users who have been with us for a while. Why that particular metric? It was important for us to find out whether our product improvements had convinced many of our users to pay for a subscription since the previous functionality and communications had not done so. A subscription would indicate that the product improvements and improved communications made a difference to those users.

A new take

First, we investigated how a user interacts with the customary update information in the app (on the familiar What’s New) and what problems there were with that.

For example, a user named Mary opens the app after her day at work to mark the start of her period. In all likelihood, there are plenty of external distractions around her at the moment: her cat is hungry, the man on television is announcing important news, the kettle is boiling … we have to compete for her attention against lots of things.

We only have a couple of seconds to grab her attention and tell her about the update. It doesn’t happen. She skims through the feature cards and leaves. Mary didn’t have enough time to get a sense of what the text is all about. We missed our chance to let a user know this update is just what they need.

Issue #1 — Hold their attention

One of our priorities is to shift from a passive to an active update narrative mode, engaging the user. We need to intercept and hold the user’s attention.

Solution:

There are a few methods we could try. We decided on a Q&A format where the user would have to pick an answer to continue the dialog. Other options include asking the user to drag the control panel from one condition to another, shake their phone, or enter an ad-lib answer for processing.

Issue #2 — Bring the update value home to the user

It’s not just Mary’s attention we have to fight for. We have only a couple of seconds to “sell” our update to the user.

Solution:

This is the biggest problem. To solve it, we have to go back to the user’s needs. We have users’ needs in mind when we make improvements to a product: we find out what the user’s goals and priorities are, then we come up with functionality to address them. At the end of the day, any product update is about closing a gap in user needs.

The need is at the core; functionality is built around it. The very top layer is how we make the user aware of the update.

Once we start sharing about the update, the connection with the underlying rationale — that is, meeting a certain need of the user — is lost. We find ourselves simply announcing a product update, much like any news update. The information ends up in a place very far removed from the actual user need.

What we have to do:

Restore the link between the user's need and the update information.

Solution:

Get the user engaged with a Q&A presentation. The question makes the user remember the need. And the answer for how to meet that need guides the user to the update.

Let us use an example to illustrate how this works:

User need: to improve their well-being

The update we have released is a new training course developed in collaboration with reputable physicians.

What we do:

1. We remind the user of the need. We ask what exactly it is that they want to improve in their life.
2. The answer is a card that informs about the new course and material aimed at improving people’s lives in the area of interest to the user.

We will not display the entire cache of pertinent content, only the training courses and articles on a specific subject. For example, if the user selects Mental Health, we display the courses and materials on Mental Health that we have in the app.

Takeaways

The benefits of this method of telling the user about a product update are:

• User engagement — we win the fight for the user’s attention.
• We boost new subscriptions among those who have been using the app for some time.

Another upside to this approach is that it’s easy to adapt to many different agendas. For instance, if you are running a training event, you may want to start by asking the participants what they wish to learn and then tell them where the pertinent material is to be found.