The value of real conversations with your users

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App discovery is your biggest problem as an app developer. So what’s the second largest problem? If you are an app developer, you would know the answer is churn.

There are many resources online (see this answer on Quora) that point us to the generic reasons people uninstall apps. You could have all this going for you, and still see over 80% of new users discard your app within a month.

So how do you combat this issue?

When you have hints on problem areas in your app’s experience, you can always turn to related metrics and test your hypotheses. However, there are issues your users face which you can find only by having real conversations with them.

Talk to your users!

There is nothing more effective in reducing churn than engaging back and forth with your users to discover their frustrations.

Here are some examples of discoveries made from phone and email conversations with users of a Video content app (>20M downloads) for India. Insights from these conversations helped increase month-on-month user retention by over 150%.

The “3-day internet plan”

There were many Indian users who had active data connections only for 3 days at a time, every two weeks or so. They would download as many apps as they could in this period, try them out,  and just forget. Apps that don’t work in the period without the internet plan usually fall out of favor and are discarded. We introduced a “save & watch” feature for these users.

The internet usage skew

We found a lot of calls coming from two Indian states our content did not cater well to. We found that mobile internet penetration was also skewed towards these states more than others. We made our messaging more obvious to reflect our content catalogs, and what was coming soon.

Too slow

There were users who said the content took too long to load. We adapted dynamically to network speeds, but we couldn’t do magic on very bad networks. We started tracking speeds and found that over 20% were experiencing < 20kbps. Our “save & watch” feature helped here too – users could start saving videos at night, and watch them when they were free the next day.

Refresh time

A lot of our users would open our app multiple times a day and not realize we have fresh content added. Though we added new content, we weren’t been actively changing featured intra-day – and they took that as a proxy for content updates. They also wanted predictability in content addition- “How do we know when you will add more movies? Every Friday?”

Device issues

In a highly fragmented device market, we found there were issues that manifested on certain families of devices that we had no access to test on and were able to fix them with focused efforts

Type of user

We had expected college students to dominate our usage, but we did not know how many users from towns and smaller cities, shopkeepers, housewives, folks working in factories, etc were using their mobile phones to find and consume content. We even had many first-time internet users coming online from their feature phones to use our app. We redesigned our app keeping these users in mind.

Continuity over quality

We had many users watching long form content, including movies, on our app. Talking to users, we understood that once they got past a 10 minute barrier into a movie, all they cared was being able to watch the full movie – not so much about the video quality. We started featuring more long form content, so users could discover the experience we enabled on their phones.

There were issues that we could solve, and issues that were totally out of our control that we discovered in talking to our users. But hey, armed with better information, we were also able to invest our energies into the right problems where we could make headway on reducing churn, and optimize better.