Apps Nobody Uninstalled (and One All Did)
Launch two similar fitness apps with like features and monthly fees. Target market: people interested in fitness. Successful marketing campaigns at launch. Each app starts with comparable App Store ratings.
Fast forward twelve months later. App A had a Day 30 retention rate of 38% and App B had a Day 30 retention rate of 6%.
What was the difference? Neither app could boast an extraordinary feature set. Both; workout tracking, progress dashboards, social media sharing and coaching content. Design wise, neither app was less than appealing on screenshot, both looked clean and modern.
The difference was the onboarding process following the launch of App A.
App A users landed directly in the account creation/registration process with no time to see or try app features before having to fill out the account creation/registration form which was formatted with 8 mandatory fields, mandatory birthday entry, no app features would load until email address confirmed.
By the time users filled out the account creation process they’ve made (3) micro-decision to discontinue using the app resulting in the low retention rate for App A.
App B is completely different from App A. App B immediately provided (12) second personalization sequence, provided the first app feature with no requirement to register (demo), and after providing the user with something of value, asked them to register to continue. The average length of time for App B users for first session was: 4:20 and App A first sessions were 0:47.
The product category and market are the same but the trajectory of retention differs completely for each case. The only reason why they would have significantly different E-Retention levels would be due to the way that each product was designed.
Retention Is a Design Problem, Not a Marketing Problem.
Many companies do not see that their product is not retaining its customers due to a problem with its design. When your retention numbers don’t match your expectations, you tend to focus on marketing; trying to do everything possible to get your customers back – through emails, push notifications, etc. While these methods are not all bad, they are treating the effect of the problem instead of the cause of the problem.
Churn is very much a design failure, but it is often treated as a marketing issue.
Evidence supports this theory: As reported by Localytics, 71% of users of an application will churn within 90 days of downloading. On the other hand; Appsflyer has also shown that Day-1 retention (i.e. returning to use the application on Day-1 post download) is the single most significant predictor of long-term retention. If you lose a user on Day-1, the likelihood of re-engaging them in any meaningful way falls below 15%.
In summary; the first session is not only very important; it’s also the only session that will determine if you will have a true user or only have an install.
The first session is completely a design decision.
The Retention Trap: What It Is and Why Companies Keep Getting Caught Up in It
The retention trap is an alluring thing as far as logic goes. Features are added; they accumulate; ultimately, the product becomes more powerful than ever. Leadership will cite this feature depth as a competitive advantage. However, at the same time, churn continues to compound beneath the surface because there was no optimization for the moment that mattered most.
More often than not, here’s how it plays out:
A product team creates an ambitious V1. It launches successfully and receives spikes in downloads, media coverage, and an App Store algorithm honeymoon boost. Then before you know it, three weeks in the retention curve is revealed: it is very steep, unfathomably steep.
At that point you want to begin building additional features to create stickiness, such as adding a social layer, adding gamification or adding a premium tier. Each feature is being presented to large amounts of high volume, highly engaged users as a celebration that has occurred to keep churn at bay.
The problem is that they were creating for a future user (the engaged, enthused, patient, and highly capable) instead of optimizing for the first 60 seconds on the device or app they created.
You are not designing for a specific user, you are designing for the many people that will download your app (or at least six of them) this week and will only give you one chance to prove you are worth their time.
What Should Happen in the First 60 Seconds
Let’s break down what the first minute does. The first minute of your users’ experience with the app will do three things (in order of occurrence), and should have:
1. Display Value Immediately
Your users will need to feel that the app is worth their investment before they can put anything into it. There should be no other alternatives presented except by doing so.
Duolingo is a very good example of this. Their onboarding of new users does not explain how to learn a new language. Instead of explaining how to learn to speak Spanish, they provide the user with a lesson and allow them to practice answering their first question in Spanish in less than 45 seconds after opening the app. This is an example of creating a connection with the users as soon as they download the app, which is something that will be extremely difficult to accomplish through a feature description.
The question that you need to ask yourself is “what is the simplest way for a new user to experience your app’s core value and how long will it take for them to do so? Create from that point moving outwards.
Decrease Cognitive Load to Nothing
The cognitive load created by requesting any kind of decision to be made by the customer during a new user’s first-time use of your product is going to be an obstacle to them successfully or willingly continuing on with your solution. With each decision a user must make ranges from completing the required fields on a form, granting you a permission request, selecting a plan, and completing a tutorial step, each of these creates friction. Friction builds up and eventually leads to the user making a decision not to continue.
Using the principle of Progressive Disclosure in design solves for this issue, only provide a user with what is necessary to complete their current task. Everything else can be saved for later. Contextually ask for permission, at the moment they will utilize the feature that requires their permission instead of creating a permission wall upon entry into the application.
Create a Reason for the User to Return before the Session Ends
Retaining users does not happen on the second day of use. It is created and engineered at the end of the first day of the first time they use your application. The user may want to maintain their streak and look to see what their progress is tomorrow, they has set a personalized goal for themselves to achieve, or they want to have a “back to” point which gives them a natural opportunity to re-enter your product.
This is excellent behavioral design, not necessarily intended to manipulate someone, but more of an intelligent design approach that provides the user with a logical next step to return to your solution rather than simply making the choice to return to your application.
UX Metrics That Really Define Retention Through Date-Driven Data
Download counts, daily active users and overall revenue are some of the KPIs used by product development teams. These performance-related metrics are retrospective measures or lagging indicators that tell you ‘What happened’ but not ‘Why it happened’. The leading indicators for retention exist within the UX layer
1. Time-to-Value (TTV): How much time elapses from the first instance when a user opens the app (or website) until they perform a meaningful action? Generally, the less time it takes the better; 60 seconds or less is a good target.
2. Onboarding Completion Rate: If you see a completion rate of less than 70% for your entire onboarding process, it is a strong indication that there is a deficiency within the onboarding design—not that there is a problem with the product team members who are using the product.
3. Session 1 Feature Discovery Rate: Which of the “core” features within your application, or available on your website were discovered by new users during their first session? Typically, once a core feature is not found during the users’ first session, it will rarely, if ever be discovered by that user.
4. Session Depth vs. Session Length:Three meaningful actions during a four-minute session is a greater indication of user value than twelve minutes with one user passively scrolling through an application. Focus on good user session depth versus session length/frequency.
Using the above metrics will help you determine where there is a failure in the design of the application prior to seeing the retention curve indicate that users are no longer engaged with your product.
Why “Good-Looking” Is Not Enough
Many wrongly believe that good design and good UX go hand-in-hand. There are beautiful app designs out there, but if you look at the retention rates of these apps, you will discover that they are extremely low because the time and money invested in creating an attractive-looking application was not matched by the investment in creating a good experience through interaction design and onboarding structure, as well as user behavior.
When it comes to retention, the focus of UX is about reducing friction, creating flow, developing emotional engagement, and forming habits. Therefore, to achieve these things, an organization needs a design team that has a solid understanding of both the visual hierarchy of the application, as well as the psychology of users who will use the application. This is particularly important in understanding that the first experience with the application should be treated as a conversion event, just as any other conversion event in the marketing funnel.
This difference is key to understanding the difference between teams who create products that customers will use versus creating products that customers will download. **Yeasinarena**, for example, incorporates this principle of designing with the retention of users as the primary focus into their mobile app development process. Their focus is not on designing a mobile app from a visual perspective, but instead on creating a mobile app with the user’s behaviors in mind. As a result of this design philosophy, the user journey the Yeasinarena team creates around delivering value and reducing friction consistently yields better retention results than when the design intention differs from the outset.
Summary
For your app, your problem with keeping users will actually be a problem that starts the first 60 seconds of using your app, rather than, say week 3, or when the user is no longer new to the app.
The retention of a user comes from decisions made during the installation & the first minute of using an app to determine if that app is worth returning to use.
The metric you can measure downloads, the results of retention are from the design of the retention and the method of retaining users (retention is a method of design and not marketing).
If you can fix the first 60 seconds of using your app then you will have significantly improved your chances of keeping a user for many months.
If you are experiencing less than expected Day-7 or Day-30 retention rate for your app then you need to start with an app audit of the first experience for the session and not a product feature roadmap. If you are looking for a design team to build an app with retention as part of the first tap then Yeasinarena would be a recommendation.