When an app isn’t delivering the results you want to achieve, it can be hard to know where to start. In this article, we explore how to bring your digital product back on track so it’s bringing value to your business and your users.
Launching a new digital product is only just the beginning. For an app to be successful, it has to deliver the right results for your users and your business. If your app isn’t doing this, then it’s essential that you understand why.
The issue might be frustrating moments throughout your user experience. There might be underlying problems in your technology. Or it could be a misalignment between what your business and your users want to achieve.
To find out how you can improve your digital product, you should always start by revisiting the reason you built it in the first place. You need to start with your business goals.
Start with Your Business Goals
You can put most digital products into one of two categories based on their primary business goal. Apps are either made to make money or save it. They’re either revenue generators or efficiency creators.
It’s possible for an app to support both of these categories, but when the primary business goal is clear it’s easier to agree on the right direction for your digital product. After all, it’s better to do one thing really well first.
Once you’re aligned on the purpose behind your app, you can start breaking down the most important metrics that indicate whether your app is delivering the right results for you and your users.
Some of these metrics will be long-term, others short. Some will be tied to specific triggers in your app analytics, while others will be outcome-focused and reflect the value your users are deriving. By combining these, you can create a digital product scorecard that quickly and effectively demonstrates whether your digital product is on the right track or not.
Book a consultation call with one of our expert Product Strategists
Know Your Audience
When you’re building a consumer app, the customer is often the same as the user. But there can be a difference between who buys your app and who uses it.
Take a SaaS platform, for example. The person involved in the decision may be the buyer but it’s often their team who uses the product the most. This difference is why it’s so important to build out distinct user personas that describe the motivations and ambitions behind the actions taken by your users.
On top of your core app analytics, you then need to create a close feedback loop with these personas to uncover additional context that might be missing from your metrics.
Regular user interviews and in-app feedback prompts highlight where there might be frustrating pain points causing your users to drop off. They’re also a great channel for capturing new ideas and opportunities to create delightful moments that increase the value your users get from your app.
Making Product Improvements
At this point, you should have a clear picture of what your goals are, who makes up your user base, and the key desired outcomes they’re trying to achieve. You should also have a good understanding of how users are interacting with your existing app,
In this next section, we explore how you can use that information to increase the value your digital product provides to you and your users.
Improving Your Existing Product Features
When it comes to improving existing features in your app, you can group enhancements into either experience or performance. Experience improvements make it easier and more intuitive for users to move through your app and achieve what they want to achieve. Performance improvements let them do that faster and more consistently.
When done right, product improvements can create memorable and delightful moments that make users more likely to keep coming back and recommend your app to others. This is a cornerstone of product-led growth and a key part of how you can grow your business faster and more cost-effectively.
Whichever the category, you can prioritise the improvement based on how much of an impact it’s going to have on your primary business goal compared with how much effort it will take to deliver. This shows you clearly where the quickest and biggest wins are.
Adding New Features to Your Product
As well as improving your existing feature set, you also need to add completely new features that will support you and your users’ goals. If you fail to iterate and innovate, you’re at risk of losing users and customers to competitors who will.
At the same time, it’s important to be mindful of feature creep and introducing functionalities that overwhelm users, add unnecessary costs, and reduce the focus of your digital product. By doing this, you run the risk of building a swiss army app that does a multitude of mediocre things but no one thing exceptionally well.
This is why you need a clear, prioritised product roadmap combining new features and improvements that balances your needs with those of your users to create long lasting value.
Conclusion
To revitalise an existing product so that it delivers the results you want, you first need to revisit why you built it in the first place. You need a clear product strategy behind your app, the users who you’re building for, what it is they want to achieve and where that intersects with your business goals.