How Do We Get People to Use Our App?

Hello again!

This week I’m going to be discussing an important aspect of application development that often gets overlooked; developing a marketing plan to get your app used by a lot of people!

Getting people to download your app and use it is important, after all, that’s the whole purpose of developing it! This is especially critical though as your application enters the beta testing stages and user feedback becomes critical in making improvements.

This is the stage that my capstone team and I are currently in, we have a solid foundational app built and we’re looking to get feedback from users on what we can improve and what features would make the app more usable. Working together, we’ve been able to start getting new users and feedback from our core audience, so I’m going to be discussing some of the steps we took to get here!

Application Visibility

One of the biggest hurdles in getting feedback on our application has been how do we get our core user group to start using it? Our app, Ops Normal, is specifically aimed at the wildland firefighting community, and feedback from these types of users is critical in us discovering bugs in the app and deciding what new features to add.

To begin, we found online wildland firefighting communities where we posted the app, some info about the team, and reached out asking for honest feedback. We also joined several online social media groups where we posted the same kind of call for feedback. In order to gain some additional visibility, we reached out to a YouTuber who runs a popular wildland firefighting YouTube page and she agreed to feature Ops Normal on her page.

Small actions such as these can make all the difference when trying to get your app used by more people. The marketing part of application development can be tedious and time-consuming, but it’s important to remember that this is how apps become popular, through online visibility and word-of-mouth recommendations!

Feedback!

Feedback is one of the most valuable things you can get from users, so it’s important to make the process of reporting simple! There are many easy ways to integrate this so users can provide reports without leaving the app. In Ops Normal, we choose to use WireDash. WireDash is a simple addition to the code base that allows users to select an icon and report feedback within the app. This feedback is then sent to the group WireDash account where it can be reviewed.

Following this course, we’ve been able to start getting feedback from the users and implementing changes to improve the app. These steps will be unique for each team and type of application, but do everything you can to get your app in the hands of the people!