How to use the app to capture the user's heart?

Article | Zhu Kun, "Fast Hotel Butler" product manager

The ability to successfully build an app and have it live for a long time is a goal that every app developer is striving for. As the manager of the "Fast Hotel housekeeper" app, the thing I think about every day is how to hold the user's heart firmly.

Hit the user's pain point

Any successful app must be able to hit a user or a few pain points, but how exactly to find the user pain point?

There are two main ways in the industry: one is the data analysis method represented by the competition product analysis, for example, the search engine Company will set up the index, carry out the search, evaluate the search result, and make the judgment to the user's demand, the other is "the answer is on the spot", the team that develops the new product often uses this method more The CEO of our company has lived thousands of fast hotels; every month, members of the development team have 3 free stay at the Express Hotel, hands-on experience of their own development of the product is reliable, customer service staff will be through the telephone and social network search methods to collect user feedback in real time; Team members will even go to the client's hotel for the weekend to see what is going on with the mobile phone to the front desk to show the order.

App development times are different, and the way you gain insights from users changes. The user sample quantity is small in the early stage more uses the scene experience Discovery Way, after the user level reaches a certain level, then may through the data mining to better satisfy the user demand. For example, "Fast hotel housekeeper" can be analyzed, help the store to grasp the nature of its surrounding customer groups, analysis of how many people every day to see his shop, some people finally did not book what the reason, and so on. The future can even explore changes in the way users book hotels.

Three standards for app

The design of app products must learn to give up, binding users through all-inclusive is always a temptation, but when you want a lot of things, you will get very little.

An excellent app product often has three characteristics: first, the performance is good, popular speaking is loading speed fast; the second is that users can find what they want, quickly and effectively solve the problem; the third is to design a humane son, which is now a lot of people often say "have love."

First of all, under the current network environment, the performance of the app product is good, the user does not need to wait and endure, this is an important standard to judge an app good and bad use. Micro-letter performance is quite prominent, in the network environment is poor, many apps can not open, it can also be used. But performance is not a purely technical issue, but it also includes strategic considerations, and developers need to balance speed and effectiveness. For example, when you click on a message for a micro-letter, it always goes to the message list instead of just displaying a single message, which, while sacrificing some speed, can make the message's arrival rate even higher.

Second, we must learn to give up. Binding users through all-inclusive is always a temptation, but when you want something special, you get very little. Simplicity is important as an app used on mobile terminals such as mobile phones because of limited screen space and limited user tasks. But how to understand "simplicity"? It is actually a reasonable arrangement. There are countless meters in the cockpit, can you say it's not simple? It has to be so complicated. So it's not that less and simpler is simplicity. The simplicity of the app should mean that the core features are very prominent, the core features can be found, and no functionality is required.

Third, "Having love" is an important feature of a good app. The app always interacts with the user, and the interactive process should be as enjoyable as possible. To be pleasant, you have to recognize your audience and add details to their preferences. In the past, the "Quick Hotel Butler" Map, the nearby hotel will be displayed suddenly, lack of characteristics and very blunt. It was later taken into account that our core user base was 20-year-old young people, their QQ skin will be very fancy, micro-blog template is full of personality, that is to say, they are seeking publicity, fun, cool, so we will be the hotel's display mode changed from the sky crashed from the fun way off.

Feel the app is alive

Not all user churn is bad, on the contrary, user management sometimes deliberately "forced" some users, "purify" the user team.

For an app, the user's download is just the first step in the March, and the user churn after downloading is a problem that must be faced. Research has said that the app product in the download three months after the average loss of 76% of users, the maintenance of users is indeed a difficult problem.

The reasons for user churn vary. One is the 3-minute effect, and even some say it's a 60-second effect, which means that if the user can't find your bright spot within 3 minutes, or if you can't solve the problem that he needs to solve, you may be able to delete it directly or enter the "limbo" indefinitely. This is the problem of the product itself and needs to make radical changes. The second is that users do not have a demand for a specific period of time, such as booking a hotel is not the day-to-day needs, if the app for this reason is shelved, it needs to be through continuous operation so that users think of you when needed.

App operation is very important to maintain the user, the industry often said the list although may be effective, but if the follow-up does not operate also meaningless. How do you understand operations? I think it includes two parts: product operation and market operation, the essence of which is to establish the relationship between products and users, and not just to do activities. Product operation of a lot of ways, the most commonly used information push. Add fun details to the product, function is also a kind of self operation, for example, we will often change the interesting boot interface, Christmas will be the hotel icon to lift the small brand of Santa Claus, the purpose is to let users feel that your product has been someone in the heart to do, your app is alive and not just cold tools.

In addition, the proper management of user expectations is also the wisdom of customer operations. Although this is not against industry rules, we reject a person who makes a 5-room reservation for 5 consecutive people, but for the app product, this can make the subscription verification process more complex, affecting the experience of other users. In order to make the product more concise, would rather sacrifice such users. In the face of such needs, we will honestly say that we can not do it, or ask the user to wait for some time, rather than casually promised to change. Setting a reasonable expectation for users and providing users with the best possible experience within a reasonable limit is also an important aspect of creating a good user experience.