What are the problems of a start-up mobile product design?

All application developers who end up with consumers should address the following three core challenges:

Unique Product Experience

Form user base, enlarge the number of users

Maintain user participation

In the Mobile world, there are few strategies and methods to cover these three points. Next, I will take these three points apart to talk about and in the end to put forward the important issues in my heart.

Create a unique product experience

So far, the mainstream of mobile design has been the definition of small screen, touch gesture template and the replacement of interface navigation. These aspects of Ascension are important, but they are somewhat powerless in stimulating the potential of product experience, as is the creation of sustainable product characteristics (as a result of inconsistencies in the design of new and old changes). Providing users with only the features that mobile computing can bring will be the focus of a new design. This design will not be restricted by the region, with a large number of sensors for the receiving organs, to create a highly interconnected and in-depth personalized services. A large portion of the service will be exclusive to mobile devices.

The next wave of mobile products will take advantage of the many features of mobile technology, such as the use of sensors (gyroscopes, geographic information, thermometers, etc.), different types of networking and abstractions such as behavioral patterns. Today, mobile device information, such as address books and SMS, is used to promote user group growth or participation, but their potential to improve the core product experience is still not fully explored. On an Android device that has been logged into a user account, developers can take advantage of the vast amount of information provided by Google services. Gmail, call History, Web records, etc., are valuable resources that can provide unlimited possibilities for creating experiences.

Forming a user base and expanding the number of users

In the search for users, the principle of "mobile first" makes many developers take a detour. This principle restricts the promotion channel to the application store or device, and the problem is that it is too small for users to find you in a myriad of software.

Today's developers mostly pull downloads through social networks, cross promotion in the same application, bonus software, advertising and even offline branding. However, the introduction of the Web version is actually a more powerful weapon, with its help, users can easily try to apply and achieve seamless switching between the platforms. However, this approach has been overlooked by most people.

Google Chrome is a typical example of this cross device experience. When you log into Google account, the content of Chrome on the computer can be easily continued on the phone side. For developers, allowing users to switch between devices and platforms without pressure is a good way to develop user relationships and cultivate a sense of dependency among users.

Maintain user participation

You can of course use money or other benefits to exchange traffic and installed capacity, but in the inability to maintain a certain level of user activity, such a growth pattern is tantamount to basket.

So how do you get users to keep your application after the trial? It is clearly not the answer to catch the customer by first impressions. The key to achieving the goal is to find the magic number of applications (magic numbers). The magic number is the most effective measure of user participation. In social applications, this number usually means the number of friends of the user; In the efficiency class, the information that best experiences the frequency of use is the magic number. Dropbox has a very clever way to find the magic number that belongs to it, I believe that is the level of use of the client (the number of devices using the service and the number of different actions performed by the service). )

Instant messaging software has been very successful in improving user participation, because almost every notification represents another user's behavior, the use of the same software to respond to information can virtually strengthen the user and users, users and software mutually beneficial relationship. And so on, you can enhance this relationship in disguise by reducing the way you send "non-user" notifications.

Finally, I think email is one of the most underrated channels. You should interact with users by email rather than as a channel for sending notifications. Imagine a user who clicks on a specific link on the mobile side and starts the application directly, and you have to be more imaginative in reshaping the user's click behavior on the mobile side.

These challenges are not in themselves controversial, but they have in some way overlooked a fundamental problem that all entrepreneurs have to address: goal (priority) determination and resource allocation. Therefore, I believe that the most important problem comes down to the choice of the starting platform. Instead of trying to skip this step in a multi-pronged fashion, you should first address the three challenges on one platform.

If you have an unprecedented idea – like creating new user behavior, you'd better choose IOS as the starting point and try to do your best in the first version. Refer to Instagram and Uber. If the corporate user is the target group, you should still choose IOS because it has a higher market penetration than Android.

However, when you want to achieve success with rapid iterations or viral transmission, Android will be a better choice than IOS. The former has almost no resistance to the review mechanism so that you can launch a new version every day even through the server silently push updates like the client. But correspondingly, you will lose something, such as no uniform equipment specifications and comprehensive platform functionality. Others say it's hard to design beautiful software on Android.