Millions of applications to develop mind

In the current Internet market, the most popular is undoubtedly the mobile Internet, so to speak, APP Store appeared that year is the first year of mobile Internet. Since Qiao Bangzhu launched the APP Store to build a recycleable ecosystem, the mobile Internet industry began to fiery, and then spread to China, and even affect the development trend of the entire Internet. In the past two years, the mobile Internet has become the hottest term in the Internet industry. Whether you are an individual developer, a start-up or an Internet giant, you have all developed mobile Internet products in various ways to find a new blue ocean. With the experience of the industry predecessors and write down their own experiences in this article, I hope to give everyone inspiration and harvest.

In the end how millions of applications is made? The current stage of mobile Internet products, the birth of a million-level applications from the following two aspects:

1.0 The cornerstone of success - products

I've always believed in the phrase "product to force, promotion to force" phrase, a million-class applications must be born because of the application itself is excellent, and promotion is just a homeopathic thing. So how to count as a good product? To sum up it is 6 words: positioning, quality, experience.

1.1 product positioning from the company's strategy and user needs

● Products at the company strategy level

At present, mobile Internet products can be roughly divided into three types: First, the web side of the supplement. More of this product is to make their own products spread to the field of mobile Internet, is a web-side supplement. Such as Netease news client, mobile QQ client, mobile applications such as Van off, their traffic does not exceed the web-side traffic, their users from their web-based original users. Second, the natural web terminal more suitable for mobile Internet products. The original intention of the development of such products is also from the web side of the supplement, the web terminal will be the accumulation of local resources into the mobile terminal. However, with the development of mobile Internet products, APP traffic exceeds the web-side traffic, and the company began to devote more resources to mobile Internet products. For example, the public comment network client, people naturally like to use mobile phones to query food, evaluate, Even photographed with a cell phone to share a happy moment. Third, purely mobile Internet products. Too many such products, such as Talk box, M chat. This strategic difference comes from your understanding of the mobile Internet, mobile phone. On the PC side, people are always sitting, the user environment they are facing is actually the same, persistence, so you will see the user bubble in an hour for a website. However, the mobile Internet is different, the phone is naturally closer to people, and people have more interaction. Meanwhile, on the mobile Internet, the environment in which people live is drastically changed, and the user environment in which they live is short-lived and can not be sustained.

● From the user needs to look at the product

An application must be developed to solve user problems, but the product is not expected to meet the needs of users does not necessarily meet the real environment. Before development, you have to determine the user needs you are a real demand? You have to find a user for your product scene, and then search for real users according to user scenarios to test their products. However, the current motivation for the development of mobile Internet products point of view, many of the original intention of product development comes from the developer's own needs, such as mobile lighting applications, such as pea pods. Undeniably, its own needs is a user scenario, but in the decision to develop the product still need to do some user needs research to confirm this demand is what users need.

In addition to functional requirements, in fact, non-functional requirements are also important. Non-functional requirements can be summarized as "light product, fast, good content, traffic province" 12 words. Sometimes, the birth of a million-level application is not necessarily innovative products, there is a possibility that is "micro-innovation" products that meet the needs of users at the same time, be more than the same type of product easier to use, which is also a Victory. Red Sea market represents a highly competitive, but also means more target users; the blue ocean in the mobile Internet industry is not necessarily better than the first you meet the user needs of the product may be unpopular, remote, the second is to promote More difficult than other popular apps because you need to develop your own user habits.

But in any case, product positioning depends on user usage scenarios, and if your product does not work in user scenarios, your product will only fall by the fate of being unloaded.

1.2 Product quality comes from the technical ability to achieve

Product quality is the foundation of product experience. Good quality products do not necessarily bring a good product experience, but a product with poor product quality will not bring a good product experience. Here's a bit of a twist, but in the end what is the product quality? Different from the product experience of this visible experience, product quality refers to the product's inherent programming logic, that bug. At present, most mobile Internet products are still at an early stage. With many users' needs being not fully satisfied, Agile development has introduced a mobile application full of bugs to take the lead in seizing the market and then pass the fast version change Way to solve the bug, improve product experience.

Admittedly, agile development plays an irreplaceable role in this still-unsophisticated mobile Internet industry. However, as more and more enterprises are devoted to the mobile Internet, the first impression of the product is very important to the users at a dozen applications daily. Agile development does not mean delivering a bug-riddled product to users.

So where do product quality come from? To put it plainly, is the ability to achieve technology. The more features, the more complicated the process of mobile Internet products, the more developers test the technical capabilities. In particular, mobile Internet products, the display of products in front of users only 3.5-inch screen, how to achieve such a small screen in the mobile Internet products is a test of the developer's ability and experience. As mobile Internet belongs to the emerging industry, it is only an industry that has only emerged in recent years. Most IOS development engineers or Android engineers have no more than five years of development experience. General developers have a good experience in developing mobile Internet products for one year. Due to the lack of developer experience, many of the first major (beta) mobile Internet products tend to have many serious bugs. Here, I conclude the two most unbearable bug, hoping to remind some newcomers to the mobile Internet, at the same time welcome to add:

1. Products automatically shut down without any end, that is, product stability. This kind of BUG often appears in mobile applications that need networking operation. Many mobile applications do not have application protection mechanism applied. When the network is not in good condition, the application can not timely feedback the data. When the user performs the operation again, it will cause conflicts. Eventually closed automatically.

2. Installation of the various applications can not be installed. In my home APP "friends tour scenery - Travel Guide" for Android beta version of this problem. Because we APP belongs to the scenic tour guide service class, need to install google map synchronously. However, due to the problem of gelding in the Mainland, licensed machines need to crack ROOT before they can use google maps, so we made a version based on the high German map "friends tour scenery - Travel Raiders." However, closed beta, we use the licensed machine installation google map version installation error, but did not prompt the user to download high Germany map version. If it is released as a beta version, it will certainly be a lot of problems. This problem is particularly prone to various versions, many models of Android applications.

Wait for you to add.

1.3 The product experience comes from a clear page layout and excellent interaction design

● page layout

The layout of mobile products needs the same structure. A clear layout structure is an essential requirement for an application. The function layout is distinctive, enabling new users to rapidly master the application's functional layout through low-cost learning, and accomplish the established tasks in a short time.

In the web page layout design, the user is the control computer is usually through the mouse, hand mouse control screen pointer, move to a location, click, double-click, drag and other operations. We see the screen, the operation is the mouse. Our visual focus is the screen, the focus of the operation is the mouse. Belonging to the different types of visual focus and operating focus. Therefore, the need to consider is how to make the layout of the page more reasonable and beautiful, allowing users to reduce the more troublesome in the operation process, that combines the beautiful and operational, allowing the user to complete the operation, the necessary mouse movement The path is as short as possible.

However, the mobile terminal uses a touch mode. The visual focus and the operation focus are already the same point, which makes it very easy for users to learn to use such devices. However, the same two points and the operation also block the focus. Therefore, in the page layout Need to take into account the user's touch screen in the operating characteristics, so that the layout is more reasonable.

(1) consider the touch of the mode of operation - to "a camera software" as an example

We use the circle to represent the blocked area. The green area is the safe area, which represents the area where we think it can be accurately located. The yellow area means that we are psychologically a bit unsympathetic and unable to determine whether we can spot the area. For example, a camera software design:

If it is a web page, the visual is indeed no problem. However, due to the same focus of the visual and operational reasons, click the edit becomes very difficult and nervous, not to mention beside is a delete button. Therefore, from such a simple button layout, to the layout of the entire product application page, you need to consider more operational rationality to facilitate the user's operation.

(2) Considering the operation characteristics of different platforms - Taking "QQ Mobile Token 2.0" as an example

iPhone "mobile tokens" and "Settings" button at a glance, click on the spot, click the interface after the flip to the back of the setting; And for the "mobile phone token" for Android, you must take full advantage of the "menu" and "return" Physical buttons, this also makes Android's page more concise:

Like this, combined with the operational characteristics of different platforms, more rational design of product pages, functional layout.

(3) consider the user's visual experience and page capacity - Take "Longhu Tianjie app" as an example

Page layout, graphic layout to consider not only beautiful, but also consider the user's visual experience and page capacity. The size of the button, the size of the text, the size of the text, the layout of the interface is reasonable? The design of the interface into the device, with the eyes, use your fingers to test to see if you can easily see the screen text, see the layout of the interface Whether it makes people feel comfortable.

In the iphone interface font size below 22 in black fonts and ipad interface below 12 fonts text seems very difficult, should try to avoid using such a small font size. So if the bigger the size, the better? In this app's business page, next to the business logo to write the name of the business, initially used to do the demo "Belle" only concise and beautiful words, the use of 60 black Fonts really beautiful again however. However, I quickly found out that there are many long names in the name of the merchant. The name of the longest one has 12 words. Therefore, the longest name is taken as the reference object. After the test, the No. 40 blackbody is selected.

● interactive process

In general, users have a clear purpose of using this product (as opposed to browsing the news site), then you have to give the user the appropriate guidance on the page, allowing users to quickly complete the task. Therefore, product design must be as simple as possible to design a direct interactive process, the page targeted guide users, to lead the user to complete its purpose quickly.

From the user experience process, the mobile terminal features that determine the business processes on the phone to have a simple, convenient and direct. In particular, the registration process on the PC, the phone input mode decided to be careful for the login, registration. Therefore, the following is a summary of the login process of a mobile product.

(1) Speaking from the page, the framework

General login, registration framework:

If you want to log in, you need to enter the user name and password, if you do not want to enter the password after the password, you can choose to remember the password, if the user forgets the password, you can give an entry to let him go password recovery operation. Of course, if these are based on the user to perform the login operation. So you can hide these elements. So, since login and registration are level, refer to the Foursquare login page as follows:

This design is very obvious advantages, that is, the structure is clear, there will not be too much interference, but the disadvantage is there, the login and register the two buttons still need to distinguish between, and these two features are too flat, in different Product phase should focus on, such as new products on the line, to be more reasonable to guide registered, mature products, to highlight the login.

At the same time, there will be anonymous features in the login, there are two anonymous cases:

1) do not need user name and password, you can log in

2) need to submit user name and password, but anonymous login, do not let others see

Scenario 1: Since you do not need a user name and password to log in, why do you have to go to the login page rather than the content page? If the product is focused on community classes and requires user login, then you still have to guide the user to log in. If the product Is a tool class, content class, hope that users can see the content, then you can let the user directly into the software, first see the content, and so need to perform some login after the operation can only prompt the user to log in.

Such as friends travel landscape - Travel Raiders:

(When the user is not logged in, use write micro-Raiders, sign in will pop-up login page)

Scenario 2: often used in forums, post bars and other anonymous post, then we only need to post an anonymous post on the page post check box on the line, you do not need to allow users to directly select the login screen. If you want to log in some forums, but do not want to be exposed online, you can add a status button above the login button, such as QQ client:

(2) process

Product exchange process is very important, is the hope that users come from? Where to go? Hope that the user in the product to complete what kind of a task flow? According to the specific product needs to judge.

A. If the process is to guide the login process, the user must have an account, can only log in to access the product, then the process is roughly as follows:

Therefore, if you want the user to enter the software just encountered this interface, to complete the login, to reach the content. You can refer to the account and password level, user-friendly operation. If the roadside network login page:

B. If it is content-based, the purpose of the login is to complete certain operations, then the login page often appears in the navigation bar, menu, or perform a login operation, the forum replies as an example, the process as follows:

At this point, the process is not the end of the log in success, but the implementation of the next operation.

To content-based and not all users need to log in to the product, rather than up a registration threshold, defeated some of the enthusiasm of the user, not as good as the first content to be exposed, when you need to perform some login users can perform the operation When, then guide you to log in page, it is logical, there is no feeling of forced login. In this case, you can use the form of floating layer to complete a simple and quick login operation, as follows:

Of course, you can also call a unified login page, that is, to reduce costs, but also to maintain unity.

There is definitely not a single standard for landing page design, but depending on your product needs, you can deduce what is the process and what features to highlight.

Finally, a seemingly simple login feature, contains a lot of architecture, process thinking, including product logic, grasp of the demand. Finally, summed up several key points in the login process:

Tell me why (why login? Why register?)

Do not give the user too many choices (too many choices mean too much thinking time)

Allow users to go all the way (the process should have a beginning and end, and can not have too many branches)

What to do with an option to follow this option (such as the password input box and forget the password)

? Content-based weakening login (at the appropriate time to prompt the user to log on the line)

Architecture and processes are two different things (a clear architecture is a foundation, a quick process is a guarantee)

2.0 successful boosters - product promotion

Many people want to know: in the end what is the operation of mobile Internet products? What is the difference compared with the site operations? My current job is mainly client promotion, of course, also involves part of the client operations, but not too much . So this chapter will focus on APP promotion in this area.

At this stage, the mobile Internet is still in the snatch market stage, in order to create a million-level applications, in addition to the product itself to force, the promotion is also very important. How to stay close to your target user is the key. So in the end product promotion will be involved in what areas? Here, for everyone to popularize the APP some knowledge.

2.1 mobile Internet product download channels

According to the experience of @ Sterling silver V introduction, APP is the most important channel to promote the application of the market. Traditional portal advertising does not apply to mobile apps with conversion rates below 3%. In order to improve the conversion rate of advertising, we must identify the target population is highly concentrated place. Obviously, the target population is highly concentrated place is to apply the market, the first is the user focus, the second is to install and facilitate applications. Then according to my data analysis found that the application of the market activation rate of about 50%, while the pure web-side, forum download and install the form of the activation rate of less than 20%, especially IOS applications, less than 10%. If you want to ask me if I have a free way to promote, then I will tell you no, APP promotion is only a relatively economical way to promote. In particular, start-up companies, do not give money to promote is equivalent to hooligans. Of course, is it really free to promote it? Yes, if you can not use money to promote, we can only rely on you, your company behind the network of resources. But remember, it's a matter of humanity, and often harder than giving you money. Speak nonsense, first to share with you how to promote APP.

● The overall pace of product promotion

At the beginning of this article, I mentioned one sentence: "Products to force, to promote the force." If your product to seize the user's pain points, then your promotion will be more effective; if your product does not accurately grasp the user's pain points, then you The promotion will be less effective. So how to promote product promotion? I will promote the product is divided into two phases: the promotion of the promotion phase and the depth of promotion phase.

1. Coverage promotion

This promotion often happens when the first version of the product is released. First, you need to put all your products on the application market. The larger the number of application markets, the better. Cover all major electronic markets as much as possible. Second, you can talk with the app market when the product launches, for example, the front market, N multiple market, Anzhi market, you can get 1-3 recommended range of bits. Then, began to contribute to some online media, made some new product release reports, improve their product exposure. Finally, collect user comments, improve their products, cultivate their first angel users.

2. Depth promotion

This promotion depends on the product quality and operations KPI. The former refers to the good reputation of the product or new version of the product to do more well under the case of the case, the depth of promotion; the latter is the end of the company strategy and department KPI driven by the need to increase the user as much as possible. Depth of promotion means throwing money. First of all, the product of large-scale, intensive network coverage, as much as possible to improve their exposure; followed by throwing money and the application market paid promotion, harvest a large number of users; Finally, is the word of mouth to maintain, access to a large number of users at the same time, guide Users have a good reputation.

Product promotion The most important point is to grasp their own pace, in the event of a negative impact on product promotion efforts to reduce the product appears certain good reputation, we must increase promotion efforts. In simple terms is homeopathic. The following specific talk about IOS and Android application promotion skills.

3. A standard measure of an application's pass: 32,900 downloads

As of June 2011, Apple Store cumulative download is 140 million, a total of 425,000 applications, the average download per application is 32,900. This should be the average number of downloads for each app on the App Store. If you do not reach this value, you have to carefully reflect on their own products, to improve their products.

● IOS application promotion

IOS promotion relative to Android is much simpler, according to incomplete statistics, IOS application downloads 80% from the APP Store, the remaining 20% ​​from 91 mobile phone assistant, Cydia, the official website to download directly. So IOS application of all promotion tools must target APP Store, as long as your application into the APP Store top 100, then you are not far away from the million-level applications. ,

1. Brush evaluation. According to some marketing company analysis, APP Store's ranking rules are mainly two factors of download volume and rating. So you will find that the new applications in the APP Store shelves for the first seven days, many applications in the publicity will allow users to download after the score, and even some applications specifically in Wei Feng Forums and other popular iPhone forums to download ratings send calls activities, their purpose Is to allow applications into the top 10 categories, as long as you can maintain a certain amount of time, your download is guaranteed.

2 free time limit. At present, domestic iPhone users began to accept the paid download application model, so there "0.99", "4.99 party" and other titles. For paid applications, time-limited free is a very effective way to promote the majority of domestic IOS application recommended sites are limited free time column, which make limited time free more famous markets include: APP43, limited free time, Netease applications. Speaking of the topic of time-limited freebies, I'd like to share here the evolution of the APP spending habits shared by Tinyfool at Geek Park, specifically in six phases:

Free to buy

Limited to buy before

Free to pick up

Buy high cost

Good buy

4.99 Party, that is, less than 4.99 can be considered, more than 4.99 killed do not buy

It is based on the evolution of such a spending habits, a lot of fee-based games and applications to limit the use of the way to become a million-level applications. Why limited exemption is so limited? Limited exemption in marketing there is a call: experiential marketing. When your game or application is doing well, you can attract a group of users through experience-free mode, and these users will share with others based on their own experience, and eventually form a word of mouth to attract more people to buy An application.

3. Paid promotion

The two mentioned above are free to promote, but as we have already said, there is no free promotion, only a relatively low cost to promote. As a start-up you do not have a platform product and no traffic support, paid promotion is the only thing you can do. Admob is a good ad for ads, and here's a tip: iAd ads must run for more than 7 days, put your apps on the leaderboard and slowly reduce ad serving when the rankings are stable . Of course, there are some domestic distribution channels, including:

Distribution channels

advantage

Experience

Wei Feng source

970, traffic concentrated in the forum

1. Charges higher, but the target user concentration, the effect is worth your money.

2. Free Way: Weifeng Forum allows activities to engage in activities, you can cast 10,000 calls, so that members of the Forum to download Weifang Forum, evaluation application calls.

Fun network

Home Recommended 2-3W views

1. Charge is relatively high, the effect depends on your application itself, if the application of the hot areas will be better, but unpopular areas are relatively general.

Love APPs

13457, good value for money

Only sell ads do not sell recommended

APP daily push

49,752

The effect is OK, if you apply good enough, there is a recommended opportunity

Iapp4me

no

Tinyfools website, the main push, seemingly still closed beta

91 Mobile Assistant

The most installed capacity of the country's most mobile phone assistant

If you want to be the main APP Store, it is not recommended that you promote the 91 mobile assistant, the APP Store rankings without help.

Of course, there are many IOS e-market, such as APP43, APP sink, etc., they are some very IOS recommended market, you can talk to them about the exchange of resources, specifically how much depends on the strength of your application.

● Android application promotion

Compared to IOS application promotion, Android application promotion is much more complex. This complexity is mainly determined by two aspects: First, the Android application installation determines the complexity of its promotion. Android application installation and Symbian software installation is very similar, only need to install the package on the phone can be installed, unlike IOS applications must rely on the APP Store, 91 mobile assistant and other third parties. So long as the user can touch, can download the Android application installation package, can become a promotion channel. The second is the Android application market is very large, from the front market, Andrews market to Sohu, Netease, Sina, Tencent and other application channels, and finally I want to search APP application search engine. According to incomplete statistics, there are about 400 application markets in the market, that is to say, as long as there is traffic, as long as there are users, you can become an application market. Because of this, Android application promotion is a very bothering thing.

1.Android application market. I have been engaged in "friends travel landscape - travel Raiders" APP promotion almost 4 months, the basic size of the Android application market have dealt with, but also based on the 4-month download, summed up the following 17 more Impact of the Android application market:

Serial number

Application market

Release method

Personal feelings