So you have an app in the app store and are struggling with app installs, user signups, app engagement, active user counts and conversions? Have you put yourself in the shoes of an actual user that fits the target audience and used the app? You will be surprised to realise how you can have a completely different perspective in many situations.
It’s natural for someone who is close to the product to not notice obvious work-flow issues in your app. Perhaps your app just needs a better Onboarding? Let’s do an app audit to identify key areas of improvements in your application.
What is an App Audit?
App audit is a (timed) activity during which experts (in product strategy, design and development) do a thorough analysis of your app. This analysis is then used to make educated guesses (based on facts, research and data) and recommendations to optimize or tweak your app experience. This would help you identify positives and negatives of your app for a potential end-user.
App audits can be as elaborate as couple of days where each aspect of the app is carefully examined and deeply thought through with the input from various stakeholders. Express app audits usually take about couple of hours where the idea is to come up with an actionable checklist which can incrementally improve the focus areas. The focus areas could be a single feature in the app, the overall app engagement, etc.
Who should get their app audited?
Anyone can benefit from an app audit. However, freshly baked apps could usually use an app audit. We have generally observed that if you have given less thought to design (probably you don’t have a UX team) then you have the maximum ROI from an app audit.
Ideas in initial stage with pop (Prototypes on paper) or digital prototypes, apps in alpha or beta stages could also use an express audit. Doing an app audit would tell you what could be the possible friction points for the users as they use your app.
Startups with ready to launch products (or MVPs) who want to make sure that their workflow is seamless and focussed on the end-user (and not the tech) can also immensely benefit from an audit.
What info do we need to audit your app?
Business goals – What is the end goal that you (or your company) wish to achieve through this app? If you do not know this, there is no way to measure success or failure. So you definitely need a main objective behind building the app.
Target audience – Is your app targeted to college going students or professionals? Defining your target audience more granularly allows you to think of various in-depth scenarios where users may interact with your app.
Decision maker – Who is the one person who would make the final decision about a particular feature going in the app or not? Someone who could also answer questions about broadly defined business goals to narrow on the exact end goal of the product. This could be a product manager or a founder generally in case of startups.
Analytics – If you already have your app in the app store or did some user studies earlier, you might have some useful data which we could use to see how users respond to your current version of the app.
What next?
Now that you know how app audits work, evaluate if your app needs an audit. If you have a fairly large app (20+ screens), identify what are the features that you could prioritize and audit for.
You could do an app audit yourself, provided that you have the right mix of people (from product strategy, design and development) or we can help you with this. Write to us about your app and we’ll set it up for you.
