Month: July 2015

The Ying and Yang of Mobile: Engineering and Design

July 21, 2015
 
Dan Katcher

After coming up with a strategy, user experience engineering and visual design are critical components to success in the mobile world. Don’t let a beautiful, easy to navigate mobile interface fool you – the design process is serious business. Using informed engineering decisions as a basis, our digital craftsmen reimagine the boundaries of what’s possible for user-driven, responsive mobile design.

Part 1: Engineering the ultimate user experience.

  1. Goal Identification – At Rocket Farm Studios, the design phase is all about trying to identify the core minimum loveable product (MLP) for release for the first experiment. To do so, we work with you in a workshop format with an essential motto in mind: we design and build applications to solve problems.
  2. Brainstorm – In order to solve problems we must first understand the needs of both app users and customers. We use our imaginations to develop user personas and give them a name, picture, and description to bring them to life.
  3. Storytelling – At the end of the day, it’s all about the user. To help us imagine an outcome, we pair user needs and personas to imagine a hypothetical situation concerning how a persona will pick up an app and use it to achieve success.
  4. Wire Framing – If you’re unfamiliar with the term, think of wire framing as the schema for an app flow. We create black and white renditions of functionality in order to detail each screen of the app.
  5. Screen Inventory – Next, we come up with a matrix of core features. To use the most relevant ideas, we constantly prioritize with the client to keep things at the MLP.
  6. System Requirements – Once we reach system requirements things start to get more technical in nature. This is when we start to think about the nitty gritty, like how to work in essentials like cache persistence, security, and log-in profiles for your mobile app.

Part 2: Designing the app of your eye.

  1. Brand Review – Sometimes startups don’t have an idea to begin with, and need some creative inspiration. To get the juices flowing we give you a bounty of ideas, you pick your favorite, and we run with it. By reviewing external apps, examining the subtleties of interaction and animation, and gauging your design goals, we want you to choose a visual style you like.
  2. Sound Check – Beep. Click. Swish. Those are just some of the sounds a user is used to hearing as he or she scrolls through an iPad, iPhone or Android application. Whether it’s the sound of a notification or simply the product of a completed action, sounds can add a unique dimension to the user’s experience.
  3. Market Preparation – If you haven’t already considered it, it’s time to get serious about figuring out what jet stream you’ll need to get behind your wings to launch your app into the app market.

So, if you don’t know where to get started with a blueprint for your app, Rocket Farm Studios can take the pressure off.

Schedule a consultation today.

Mobile Strategy: Prepare for takeoff.

 
Dan Katcher

In today’s world of instant communication and handheld, user-centric technology, having an established mobile strategy for your business is more than just a trend. In fact, if it is difficult to find and access your brand or product from a mobile phone or tablet, you’re missing out on a huge piece of the potential pie.
While the cultivation of a healthy mobile strategy can transform a company’s productivity levels, increase ROI, and widen brand exposure, it is all too often considered a daunting technical undertaking.

Let Rocket Farm support, steer, and launch you in the right direction.

Whether you’re looking to grow an established online presence or on the launch pad of a brand new business venture, you know the importance of ‘going mobile’. But what does it really mean to break into the scene of mobile applications and environments? Where do you begin?
Rocket Farm Studios is founded on the practice of getting creative, creating a plan, and proceeding to launch, much like the way an organic farm sows the seed, cultivates the crop, and goes to market. Our custom, five-step approach to mobile strategy produces bright ideas for the unique capabilities of mobile, while continually supporting and responding to your company’s very individual organizational needs.

Step 1: Internal Review

As soon as you’re ready to take your first steps into the mobile world, we’ll assemble a team of dedicated business and mobile analysts to conduct an internal review. We want to get to know you! This first stage of internal review will serve to identify your business goals, core products, markets, and target customers. There’s still more to learn about your business and brand! Up next is our mobile readiness assessment, conducted to determine how to best prepare for your next foray into a dynamic mobile environment.

Step 2: External Review

After an internal review, we put away the magnifying glass and take out the telescope to broadly scan the mobile marketplace, and specifically, your brand’s own competitive landscape. Rocket Farm conducts this external review by identifying competitors, analyzing user behavior, and noting industry trends, all the while compiling a brilliant stockpile of ideas and eye-catching details.

Step 3: Ideation

Ideation is where creativity interacts with technology. The Rocket Farm ideation phase gives us the opportunity to dig through our ever-growing cache of ideas to consider which features will best interact with your customers, employees, or partners in a mobile capacity. To cultivate a perfect mobile product, we place emphasis upon user-focused design, and carefully sift out the ideas that are most relevant to your organization and your industry. Combining the wants and needs of your team with technology trends and the demands of the target user: that’s what brings these freshly harvested ideas from field to farm to (mobile) market.

Step 4: Create a Roadmap

We’re almost ready to take off, but before we launch it’s essential to create our strategic roadmap. We’ll work with you to build a reliable, yet cost effective plan of action. This stage of the Rocket Farm Studios process is essential in order to seamlessly integrate your established architecture onto a mobile environment: it’s not a successful mobile mission unless your crew is prepared to take flight!

Step 5: Get Started

Once we’ve completed our strategic roadmap, it’s time to launch your brand new mobile application. In this stage of the mobile strategy partnership, we release your newly optimized mobile technologies, while continually measuring and monitoring feedback, troubleshooting, and conducting regular technology reviews. A mobile strategy partnership with Rocket Farm Studios opens the door for an epic product launch – partnered with intuitive internal or external marketing efforts to ensure an eager audience. What’s the end result? A winning mobile strategy that benefit your business on all fronts, through small, high impact projects and increased accessibility to your target audience. Welcome to the world of mobile!

So, if you don’t know where to get started with a blueprint for your app, Rocket Farm Studios can take the pressure off.

Schedule a consultation today.

3 Ways to Make Your Mobile App Users More Loyal

July 7, 2015
 
Ashley Rondeau

In our 3-part metrics series, we wrote about “Loyal Users” and how important this group was to the lifeblood of a successful mobile app. Typically, a Loyal User is defined as someone who opens your app 3+ times in a given period (monthly is a good estimate for most apps). Unfortunately, according to Fiksu, it seems Loyal Users have been trending down since 2013.

It’s not easy retaining customers in the mobile world, but there are ways to design your app to make loyalty a key element of your product. Here are 3 ways to make your app more conducive to fostering loyalty.

1. Embrace gamification.

Yes, you’ve heard this term over and over again, and you can roll your eyes all you want but the concept won’t go away because it works. It’s probably no surprise the most popular global Apple App Store category is games; girls (and boys) just want to have fun. But more than that, they want to feel like they are “winning.” That’s the gist of gamification: rewarding users and making them feel like they’re achieving something. If you want repeated use, giving your users that virtual carrot is still one of the best ways to make that happen.

This does take some creativity; not all apps are immediately conducive to having a game element. However, if boring 401(k)s can get a 17% participation bump by allowing users access to an anonymous “leader board,” almost anything can be gamified.
For example, Oscar Health Insurance has a great gamification element. Users receive a pedometer that syncs to the Oscar mobile app and if they hit their steps for the day, they get a $1 credit. How smart is that? Not only does it make logging into the app desirable, but it keeps your users healthy so they might have less use for health insurance (which saves Oscar money in the long run). Make sure your app is as smart about gamification as well.

2. Reward loyalty.

You might think this falls under gamification, but of course companies rewarding customer loyalty has been around as long as business itself. In the mobile age, those rewards can be much more immediate and varied. Dropbox found success by rewarding referrals with increased storage. Uber provides credits for referrals. Many apps allow you to accrue redeemable points for various rewards. Some games even reward you just for opening the app every day.

This is a no-brainer, but the challenge lies in this statistic: a 2013 report showed that customers are enrolled in 7.4 loyalty programs on average, and each year 53% of these users stop participating in at least one loyalty program a year. So it’s an easy idea to come up it, but a difficult idea to sustain with your audience.
For effective rewards that foster a loyal user base, build your rewards program into your app as a prominent section and not hidden away under a menu. A good example is the Dunkin Donuts app, where “DD Perks” is always front and center, with notifications:
Next, personalize rewards using analytics instead of awarding all your users the same things. The more you can cater to each person with real value he or she can use, the more likely he or she will come back for more. Thus, collecting analytics through your mobile app on user behavior is incredibly important.

3. Leverage Friends in Push Notifications.

What notification is going to be more compelling: “Check out this news article,” or “Robert sent you this news article”? Unless you hate Robert, the latter has a social connection that will make users more likely to respond to the push notification and this is a smart way to stand out on your customer’s mobile device.

This will mean designing your app with some social aspect to it (but if you’re embracing our first tip about gamification, you probably already will) and being able to use the name of an actual person the user knows. For example, Venmo added “like” and comment options to their peer-to-peer transactions. Is it necessary for the app to function? Not at all, but it’s a great way to get push notifications to the users that they won’t mind, since it comes from someone they know.
It’s becoming a crowded mobile marketplace and getting loyal users is tough. Make sure your app is designed with loyalty in mind from the beginning to stand out from the rest of the pack.

So, if you don’t know where to get started with a blueprint for your app, Rocket Farm Studios can take the pressure off.

Schedule a consultation today.