What Can You Learn From Conducting App Market Research?

Mobile apps have never been more popular among consumers, making it even more important to get your app right immediately to engage your market. You won’t get the downloads or engagement you want if your mobile application fails to meet customer needs and expectations.

So, how do you avoid these traps? By conducting app market research before launching any project.

Mobile app market research gives you crucial insight into your target audience, helps you identify potential competitors, and gives you an objective roadmap to improve your app's user experience. Let’s look at how this works in practice.

Identify The Target Audience For Your App

Modern apps need to be developed for a specific audience, and investing in market research will allow you to determine your target audiences and what they need or want from a mobile application. The data you collect will yield valuable information you can use to create an app that is precision-tuned to their needs, with the features they want and a price they’ll accept.

Conduct A Comparative Analysis Of Your Competitors

Likely, one or more of your competitors will already have an app in place targeted at your customer demographic, so a good way of boosting the success of your own project is to analyse what’s working for them and (crucially) what isn’t. You can go as deep as you need to with this, but a good place to start is to compare price points, app features, design styles, and the user experience of competing apps to determine what advantages and disadvantages they have in their market compared to your brand. Also, look at social media (Reddit and Instagram are good places) to see what customers say about these apps. What do they like about them, and were there any technical faults or design faux pas that got people talking for all the wrong reasons?

Test Your User Interface Through Market Research

User interface (UI) and user experience (UX) are vital and interlinking factors in the success of any app. Unfortunately, many commercial apps experience embarrassing usability issues post-launch that could and should have been picked up beforehand. Conducting market research on all elements of a proposed app development can help you understand the app from the user’s perspective and make targeted changes to improve user experience, saving you time on troubleshooting. Collecting candid user feedback before launch will help you identify usability issues, blind spots, design flaws, and intuitive blockers that hinder UI, and incorporating customer feedback at the development stage (and during updates) will increase user retention rates and positive feedback.

Use A Focus Group To Develop The USP

The best way to find out what your customers want from an app is to ask, and the easiest way to do this is to use an online or IRL focus group drawn from a cross-section of your buyer segments. You can use these groups to test the messages, imagery, and features your target audience values the most and hone in on your app's unique selling point to your target audience. These plus points can be emphasised throughout the design stage, reducing the risk of problems after launch. If you do this right, your focus group could also become your early adopters, leading to significant networking and social media referrals.

Mobile App Development Services From Glance Group

At Glance, our goal is to help our customers create unique, engaging, and profitable apps that keep their customers coming back for more, and a key part of this is market research.

We offer an end-to-end service covering all aspects of mobile app development for maximum value for money and return on investment. To find out more, click here to speak with one of our experts today.

Image Source: Canva