Usability Testing Might be the Key to Your Mobile App’s Success

As clients, we tend to look away or frown when someone mentions marketing. ‘It’s manipulative, they’re just trying to sell you things you don’t need’ & so on. But as business professionals, we understand completely the use of marketing and that while it has the purpose of selling, it doesn’t shove a product down the client’s throat. If you market your product exactly to your target audience, they will be delighted to take you up on the offer. You just need to know how to market it to the right audience.

So, if you do this with a product you want to sell, why wouldn’t it apply to an app in the App Store? If you develop a stunning app, with great performance, it might just sit in the App Store with no downloads if you don’t market it to your desired audience. Even though, according to Salesforce 2014, 85 percent of smartphone users use apps daily and say they couldn’t live without them, not all of them need or want to download the app you developed. You just need to find the right audience for your app. That’s why we think usability testing and app usage data is crucial when trying to release an application.

App usage data is very important in sketching out who your client is, but what really draws the picture is usability testing. This type of testing, which you might have heard of in the form of black box testing, helps you uncover user behavior and have a better understanding of what makes him/her tick. Are you already intrigued? You should be, because this might just be the key to success. Let’s take a closer look at what usability testing does and how it can help you ‘point’ the app to the right crowd.

The perfect marketing strategy

First of all, as we said before, usability testing is the key to the best marketing strategy you can have for your mobile app. When you know and understand how your targeted audience thinks and, especially, what they want, you can establish the right hook and the right platforms where you should advertise your app.

For example, if your app allows users to upload food recipes with images that show off delicious-looking plates, the testing in collaboration with the app usage data might find out that your audience uses the Instagram app a lot. You might want to develop an advertising campaign only for this app, which will surely bring you more downloads than posting the ad in a cars magazine. Do you get what we’re getting at? Fewer ads in the right places is better than more in all the wrong places.

Personalized content

When you know your customer and you know what he/she enjoys, you can paint a portrait of them. That means you will start understanding how to talk to them, to engage them further. For example, notifications are a big part of interactive apps. Your push notifications could be formal, or maybe on the funnier side, depending on the personality of your user.

How it works

Now, that you understand better how you can use this sort of testing in improving your marketing strategy and even your app, we can tell you a little bit about what usability testing does. Basically, this test refers to five main parameters which tell the app developer key information about the targeted audience. These are: efficiency, learnability, errors, memorization and satisfaction.

Based on these five components, black box testing can fan out into more specialized testing techniques. Some of them are: unit testing, system integration, smoke testing and functional testing.

You might think this process of identifying the user’s behavior will only benefit you and your sales. But actually, the user will also be very pleased with the testing being done, because it ensures you give him/her the best platform for their personal liking. The app will be helpful, personalized and a delight to use. They will surely become loyal users and might even support your app in different projects.

Conclusion

When developing an application, the technical process is not the only thing you should keep in mind. Finding out how your targeted audience thinks, what they like, how they live their life is extremely important for both your app and your sales. If you have a marketing strategy, you should definitely base it on the usability testing as well as app usage data, because targeted marketing is the best type of marketing.

Author: Mehul Rajput is CEO of Mindinventory, a leading mobile app development company which provides best iPhone app development and Android app development services. Follow him on Twitter at @mehul_sap2004.