Can we imagine a day without Facebook or Google? Can any employee think of a day without Google-Drive or Dropbox?
It’s a technical world out there and we use all these tools to connect and know about everything under the sun. We use Facebook to learn about our friends, Google is our gateway to the internet and Dropbox is used for sharing and uploading files.
Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were both PhD students at Stanford University in Stanford, California.
It was originally nicknamed “BackRub”. Eventually, they changed the name to Google, originating from a misspelling of the word “googol”, the number one followed by one hundred zeros.
After the company’s IPO in 2004, founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page and CEO Eric Schmidt requested that their base salary be cut to $1. Before 2004, Schmidt made $250,000 per year, and Page and Brin each received an annual salary of $150,000.
One interesting little tidbit about Google is that all new employees are called “Nooglers,” and are given a propeller beanie cap to wear on their first Friday.
2. DROPBOX
Did you know that the founder of Dropbox, Drew Houston, conceived the idea after repeatedly forgetting his USB flash drive while he was a student at MIT.
He founded Dropbox, Inc. in June 2007 and was officially launched at 2008’s TechCrunch50, an annual technology conference.
Dropbox has been named as the world’s fifth most valuable web startup after Facebook, Twitter, Zynga, and Groupon.
But Dropbox’s fast growth hasn’t always been smooth. It burst into China, only to find itself blocked by the Chinese government.
3. SKYPE
Skype’s original proposed name was Sky Peer-to Peer. It was founded in 2003 by Janus Friis from Denmark and Niklenstrom from Sweden.
Skype comes bundled with a mind-boggling number of exotic and unlikely locales and languages. Here are just a few of them….Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan,
Chinese (Traditional and simplified), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Nepali, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian and European), Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese.
Did you know that a Skype user can have local numbers in any country, with calls to the number charged at the same rate as calls to fixed lines in the country. The countries on this growing list are referred to collectively as the Skype.
4. FACEBOOK
Facemash is the original name of Facebook. Did you know that at first it was used to rank girls of Harvard University and the ranking was done only by the Harvard students?
It was founded on February 4, 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow Harvard University students Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes.
Did you that Al Pacino’s face was on the original Facebook homepage.
The “Social Network ” Movie based on the Facebook has won Four Golden Globes.
The founder Mark Zuckerberg is red-green colorblind, which means blue is the colour he can see best. No prizes for guessing why his favourite colour is the dominant palette for the Facebook site.
Moreover it is reportedly impossible to block Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook.
CONCLUSION
We are the children of a technological age and we have found streamlined ways of doing our everyday work by using hundreds of online tools. we use all these tools to connect. Today I have provided some tidbits of information about a few of them. So that when you use them next, you will be be better informed not just about the usage of the tool but also about the tool itself.
It is a document that usually communicates ideas, various research outputs, and sets a direction for other designers and developers. Now, for design professionals, these deliverables are a tangible manifestation of the evolving design direction & communicate how that direction can be achieved. Each deliverable is structured in a way that helps provide solutions for the next phase. But not everyone understands this term often when discussing or presenting ideas during various phases of a design process. Thus, UI UX design deliverables are very much useful to break down complicated ideas or functionalities and thus making them easier to understand for everyone in the room.
What are the types of design deliverables?
In the initial stages of design, the focus should not be on high-quality UI, rather effectively communicating the initial ideas for the design solution. At every stage of the design process, the type of deliverables varies to an extent. With a view of adopting the best way for information transfer, there are three types of deliverables.
Creation deliverables – Used to provide low-fidelity ideas during the early stages of the design process.
Communication deliverables – Adopted to communicate everything that we learn from each design session to keep the team aligned.
Lollypop Design Agency in Silicon Valley is often asked by potential clients and design evangelists about various design deliverables that we and other design giants offer to meet business goals, keeping in mind the user needs and expectations.
No matter what industry we work for, from small startups to established companies, the deliverables for any project following the design process are more or less the same and vary according to the available resources, requirements, timelines, and budget.
Here are some of the major design deliverables that various Silicon Valley design agencies practice for their different projects as a part of their design methodologies.
Let us now understand these items one by one and their significance in the whole process.
Stakeholder Interviews takeaways
It is always a priority to understand brand perspectives, varying user behavior to compliment the importance of competitive brand stake in the marketplace & identify differentials. Also, stakeholder interviews play a pivotal role to help guide the flow of the entire project considering the business goals, technical constraints, usability problems, and what customers expect out of a final product or service.
User research document
User research is the most important part of the design process that encourages us to precisely discover how our target customers feel while collaborating with the product that is designed to meet their objectives. User research is done to gain the sharpest possible insights into the needs and pain points of the users while stakeholder interviews give us insights into the business goal of a product.
UX Audit
UX audit uses methods to expand an existing situation and offer heuristics-based recommendations for improvements or user-centric enhancements. Ultimately, a user experience audit helps us understand how to boost conversions by making it easier for users to achieve their goals on your site or software along with pointing out critical, mid-level, and major issues and how to prioritize issue resolution in any product. UX audit is a method to make sure the brand communicates consistently across all customer experience touchpoints.
Many of our Clients find this to be an invaluable investment with strong ROI in future development as this audit process helps to vet and validate the product roadmap, ensuring a highly successful product launch without costly redesign or redevelopment.
Information Architecture
Information architecture and wireframes are all about organizing the content and flow of a website or an application so that users can complete their tasks and achieve their goals quickly. The focus is on creating usable content structures out of complex sets of information.
User flows
User flow can be considered as a series of user actions or simply the various states that the user needs to go through to achieve any expected goal. The main goal of any user flow is to provide designers & developers a detailed description of all the possible flows, including edge cases, errors, and various states. User flows also help businesses have a high-level view of the product and make sure their features, technical jargon, and workflows don’t confuse the user.
Wireframes
Wireframes generally give the first impression on how a website or app might look by incorporating the Information Architecture and arranging elements to best accomplish a particular purpose. Since it is the first phase of the version there is a scope of changing plans and ideas. These high-fidelity designs can be used for usability testing, and serve as an excellent reference for developers to get a good idea of the final product. Wireframes help connect the site’s information architecture to its visual design by showing paths between pages. It also helps prioritize content through the determination of how much space to allocate to a given item and where that item is located.
Visual designs
The visual design may be considered as the “final coat of paint” on the product but it’s not just that: visual design can greatly affect the UX of a product, and therefore must be approached very carefully. Hopefully, a lot of interaction design and usability heuristics were worked out during prior steps of the UX design process so that the designers can focus on the visuals. It’s one last opportunity to take the product to the next level. Visual design is the last step before handoff to developers and the phase where a style guide and final specs are crafted. It’s not just about “making things pretty,” but also an opportunity to strategically define & implement the brand’s identity into color schemes, usable layouts, creating contrast, and visual hierarchy.
Animations
Animations are used purposefully to enhance the overall user experience and guide users along the way. They are used for various purposes like feedback, continuity, directing attention, etc. These animations in the form of GIFs, videos, or Lottie files are used by developers to implement into the final product. When animation is used subtly, it can help users build mental models about how the system works and how they can interact with it. UI animations are subtle, unobtrusive, and brief micro-interactions, they can improve the user experience and can communicate feedback and state changes, prevent disorientation, and strengthen signifiers.
Also, animations offer a level of sophistication to an experience and help diversify the product experience in the marketplace.
Design system
A design system can be considered as a set of design-specification documents that are intended to be one single source of truth that groups all the digital elements for any brand/product. Style guides, rules for typography, colors, responsive behavior, photos, and visual designs as a comprehensive design system are usually the ultimate handoff to the clients and the developers. Some style guides and specifications are put together manually, and others are generated automatically. This design system can be thought of more like “bibles of style” on the shelf that everyone on the team can refer to.
Design Systems will also influence and compliment brand identity within digital marketing efforts by extension which is a value add to clients & marketing/product teams!
The final step in the design workflow is to create specifications for development teams. Margins, padding, assets, element measurements, color codes are various small details that need to be considered while building any product. These minor details if missed can impact the overall user experience of the product.
How hard will it be to add some new deliverables soon?
Design deliverables as mentioned, communicate how a direction can be achieved to lay that final product. Changes in these deliverables are expected over time according to the shifting user behavior and variance in business needs. Now, adding new deliverables is pretty easy but ensuring its consistency, accuracy, and quality is the most difficult part. Most importantly above and overall, is validating and carefully considering whether that deliverable is truly adding value to the entire project or the workflow to be specific.
Conclusion
UI UX design deliverables again vary according to the needs of the client and project priorities.
The deliverables and the way they are handed off, the methods per se are more than enough as a whole. Some parts of the documentation can be done parallel to the process or some are done before or after the process. Now the tools used for these deliverables can vary to an extent, but that’s a topic for another article.
Thank you for reading this blog & stay tuned for more articles on thought leadership.
It is a known fact that human is a social animal. A human needs to interact with his fellow humans to express himself. Interaction gives a human a sense of comfort and understanding. This fact is well utilized by Chatbots, which has been a revolution in the market in a short time. The Chatbot technology has taken a giant leap and has emerged as a ground-breaking trend. All the businesses are eager to keep up with the updating trends and utilize the Chatbot technology to interact with their customer base and influence the market. Within the brief time-period, Chatbots have taken over the market. They are seen to be rocking the sectors of Customer Support, Customer behavior Analysis, Customer Service & Management, DevOps Management, Branding, and other Qualitative tasks.
What is a Chatbot?
In the most simple layman language, A Chatbot is an automated computer program that talks back to you. It interacts with the users as a human would and attends the customers round the clock without needing any break or having any geographical limitations. The conversation can be either text-based or voice-based, depending upon the requirement of the business. It is a virtual assistant that aids businesses to get closer to their customers and broaden customer engagement. With the introduction of ultra-modern technologies like speech recognition, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and NLP (Natural Language Processing), Chatbots have advanced so much that they can simulate a human conversation very closely.
Broadly, Chatbots can be divided into two categories:
1.Command Based Chatbots:
These Chatbots are based on the “if-else” algorithm. These Chatbots do not learn from the conversations they have; instead, they can only answer a limited number of predefined questions. It has a set of pre-written questions with specific answers. In these situations, users do not usually type or converse with the bot; instead, they select one of the many options provided to them. They have a fixed database so they can not answer the questions which are not listed in their database and can not function outside their code.
2. Artificial Intelligence Based Chatbots:
These Chatbots learn from the conversations they have with users and better themselves over time. They are contextual Chatbots and utilize high-end technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning and appear quite sci-fi at the initial glance. They can understand natural questions and reply with the most appropriate answers. They remember the details about their customers and improvise their communication with them accordingly.
Now, if you are asking yourself, “Do I really need a Chatbot for my business?”, the question itself is problematic. The market is ever-growing, and the competition is getting stronger every day. The inability of a business to keep up with such a trend, which is woo-ing the market with its exceptional capabilities, could be a fall-behind for and your business. NOW is the ideal time to introduce your business with this cutting-edge technology and watch your sales and business fly high. Your business/company might be in a need of Chatbot Development if you relate to any of the below-mentioned points:
If you own an E-Commerce Business:
As per a recent study, it has been established that E-Commerce is one sector that is expected to make the most benefit out of the Chatbot Technology. The Chatbots can turn the monotonous shopping process into an exciting one by encouraging more user engagement. A Chatbot can keep an account of customer history, preferences, location, address, and navigation and, based on that, personalize the whole shopping experience for the customer. The Chatbots can recommend customers new products according to their preferences and also provide them with personalized vouchers and coupon codes, which can boost up customer engagement, resulting in an extremely positive impact on the sales. For example, if you have are a Pizza delivery App, a Chatbot can remember the previous orders made by the customer, additional topping requests along with their address and contact details so that they need not fill in the information again while placing an order. This makes the ordering process seamless and attracts more customers. This also increases the loyalty of the customer towards the brand and ensure that the customer revisits your app/website.
If you have customers/queries coming in round-the-clock:
Chatbots are not bound by and physical or geographical limitations. They can work day in and out without getting tired or needing a break. So if you are a business that deals with customers from different time zones, or if you like to keep your services open each and every day, every time, Chatbots can be a blessing for you. This takes off the burden of this redundant job from the shoulders of a human employee and allows his energy to be utilized for something more crucial.
If you need to give repetitive/similar information:
Most of the businesses need to answer an almost identical set of questions all the time. Customers usually inquire regarding the timings, address, or prices. A significant portion of human effort can be saved by automating this process with the help of Chatbots.
If scaling your business is requisite:
Unlike humans who can handle just 3-4 customers (at max) at a time, there is no such limit for the Chatbots. Chatbots can be assigned as the initial point of contact for the customers. In this manner, they can help to filter or segregate the customers according to their issues and then raise the issue to a human representative if required. This way, the tedious and redundant part of recurrent question-answering is handled by these new-age virtual assistants. They increase your productivity and efficiency, thereby improving your ranking and reputation in the market.
If you are low on time and budget:
No matter how fancy and sci-fi these Chatbots sound, the cost of building one won’t be leaving any holes in your pocket. The cost of developing a Chatbot is often similar to or sometimes even less than developing an application. Additionally, Chatbots aren’t just economical but are worth the price you pay for them as they bring in a commendable amount of business along with them. They are like a one-time investment that can take your business to a new height.
One Chatbot is equal to an army of employees. It saves the time of your team, which might otherwise go into redundant tasks or hiring a team to do the Chatbot’s jobs.
If you are targeting social media:
The integration of Chatbots with various social media websites and apps and their capability to engage the audience on the same has swept off the market. In this age of social media and smart devices, people prefer having apps that are multi-functional. Therefore, it is crucial for businesses not to leave any potential area to grab the customer base. Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, etc. have become the greatest markets, and Chatbots can help you acquire them by interacting with your customers on the same.
If you need to analyze customer behavior:
The Chatbots can be made to ask for feedback from the customers regarding their experience on your website/app or about product or service. This feedback can be a great help while making the marketing strategy and targeting a more precise clientele. The data acquired by the Chatbots can be used to provide a personalized experience to the customers, which can significantly impact the engagement on your platform.
Conclusion
A Chatbot is the need of the hour for every business, whether big or small. No matter which industry you belong to, Chatbots can definitely scale up your business and put you on the front foot, a step ahead of your contemporaries. The customer is always looking for a smoother experience, and with a Chatbot, you can ensure that your customer gets exactly what they want.
Facebook Data Breach affected over 87 Million Users in March this year and the days that followed are affecting the millions of mobile app development companies globally.
This is the story of what happened and how it continues to affect the mobile app development industry even days after the fire has settled.
Backstory of What Went Down with Facebook and 87 Million Users in March 2018
In the weekend of 17th March 2018, the news and uproar arose against Facebook when the news came out that the social media giant had been wrongly sending out personal user data to Cambridge Analytica, the political consultancy that worked on Trump 2016 election campaign. The case was not that of a hack, it was of not informing the users in black and white of what data is being shared to the third party apps that request access into not just users’ but also their friends’ Facebook profile.
The next few days were utilized by Facebook in large scale reputation management – accepting what happened heads on and making auditing of all third party apps, to see how they are using the user data, their action plan.
With the news of data breach having settled now, the restriction on mobile app developers who are accessing users’ Facebook profile remains.
The Direct Impact of Facebook Data Breach on Mobile App Development Companies, Globally
Following the day the data breach news broke out, Facebook has put all the third party apps that are associated with the social media platform under audit scrutiny. The brand is now going through all the apps analyzing what information they are taking and how they are using more minutely than before. This, in turn, resulted in Facebook banning over 200+ mobile apps.
Under its new data privacy statement, Facebook has put its foot down on the decision that it would be taking away the developer access from apps that are not being used by a user in over 3 months. Facebook also said that it is changing the login process in the next version as a system that would limit the access data to only the users’ name, profile picture, and email address. If the app needs any more access it will have to seek Facebook’s permission.
Also, Facebook has announced the new set of European Privacy controls, which highlights that users will now be asked to give permission if they wish to see an advertisement from the third party apps, giving the control of personalization to the end users.
Following this, doing targeting advertisement through Facebook has become a little difficult for the app developers. The app development companies that also handle the marketing efforts might have to start looking at other social media platform for app marketing opportunities.
What should be the next plan of action of the mobile app development companies
Incidents like these, like what happened when Uber got hacked or when PayPal was hacked, end up giving a direct negative blow to the app development industry, with Facebook incident, it’s no different.
The biggest impact that mobile apps that give login access through Facebook have faced is a decline in the login rate emerging because of the lost user trust into how their data will be used.
As mobile app development companies, it has become our responsibility to ensure that we have a framework in place where the exact detail of how the information is being used is specified to the users. We will have to make conscious efforts to only take in that information that the app actually need to function.
As for asking for viewing friends’ profile for marketing goes, apps should look at other ways to extend their user base at the back of one user. They should make use of another marketing medium like discounts on sharing the app or sharing the recent purchase on Facebook to take the word out.
Going a little in-depth in the technical side, here are the things that a mobile application will not be able to do with Facebook bringing major changes, rather restrictions in the access that its API is giving –
1. Related to Login
Users will no more be able to publish anything on Facebook through the business’s mobile application.
Apps asking for following information will have to go through a strict security check before the permission is given – Users’ Friends, events, likes, group, photo, post, video, and tagged places.
Apps will no more be able to get following information through users’ Facebook login – religion, politics, relationship, friend list, education, work, about me, and activity preferences like music, book, movie, etc.
2. Related to Facebook Events
Apps will no more get following information – attending, declined, comment, feed, interested, no reply, photos, posts, videos, and comments.
Companies can no longer post operation on maybe, interested, attending, or declined edges.
3. Related to Friends
Facebook has removed the following social contexts – Friends who like, Friends tagged at, music friends heard, videos friends watched.
Mutual Friends API is not available anymore
Apps’ right to invite friends will be returned with an empty data set.
4. Related to Tags
Apps will no longer be able to get access to photo, video, or post of the non-app users who have been tagged by the app users on Facebook.
Apps will no longer be able to view users’ tagged places
Apps will no longer get to see the detail of friends users tag on posts or photos/videos.
5. Related to User Information
Apps will no longer be able to get any user information related to – About, Education, Friend List, Interest, Political Inclination, Religion, Relationship, Website, and Work.
Now that you, as a business that is on mobile using the Facebook API, know what all restriction you will be facing following the Facebook new data privacy new guidelines, let us look at the solution that you have.
The only solution that you have left with amidst all the restriction and scrutiny is changing your business model.
You will have to find other ways to get users’ information beside relying on Facebook for it. Plus, your app layout should be clear enough for the time when Facebook scrutinizes it for the rightful intent behind collection of user information.
In short, if you want to continue using Facebook as a mode of getting user data you will have to be your intention known and even then, it is time to expand your advertisement mode and not rely on just platform.
Assuming that you’ve heard the word ‘API’ for like zillion times while communicating with mobile app developers, today I’m going to cover everything about APIs in this article. So, put your seat belts and get ready to get into the world of APIs – the superheroes behind the functioning of the mobile apps.
Let’s begin with what are APIs?
1. API
API(Application Programming Interface) is a set of instructions, standards or requirements that enables a software or app employ features/services of another app, platform or device for better services. In short, it’s something that let apps communicate with each other.
For example, when we hit on the ‘Connect Facebook’ button on Candy Crush, it does not ask us to enter our Facebook account details. Rather, it accesses the data from the Facebook server and let us enjoy playing – all thanks to API.
An API is the base of all the apps that deal with data or enable communication between two products or services. It empowers a mobile application or platform to share its data with other apps/platforms and ease the user experience without involving the developers. On the top of it, APIs eliminate the need to build a similar program or platform from scratch; you can use the existing one of some other app/platform. Because of these factors, both app developers and business leaders focus on API development.
If you are also interested in API development or wish to gain a sound knowledge of the same, keep reading
Before we delve further, let’s just have a look at the basic terminologies that will make it easier to understand the concept.
2. Terminology
a) API Key: When an API request through a header or parameter to recognize the requester, the authorized code passed into the request is said to be an API Key.
b) Endpoint: When an API interacts with another system, one end of the communication channel is termed as Endpoint.
c) JSON: JavaScript Object Notion or JSON is said to be a data format used for APIs request parameters and response body.
d) GET: The RESTful API’s HTTP method of obtaining resources is called GET.
e) POST: It is the RESTful API’s HTTP method for building resources.
f) OAuth: It is basically an Open standard authorization framework that renders access from the user’s side without directly sharing the credentials.
g) REST: REST (Representational State Transfer) is a kind of programming architectural implementation meant to enhance the efficiency of communication between the two devices/systems. It is light-weighted and based on the idea of making a particular data available only when requested by sharing references to the data instead of the entire copy of the data itself. The systems enforced on this architecture are said to be ‘RESTful’ systems, and the most overwhelming example of RESTful systems is the World Wide Web.
h) SOAP: SOAP or Simple Object Access Protocol is a messaging protocol for sharing structured information in the execution of web services in computer networks. It works with XML information set and application layer protocols (like HTTP and SMTP) for message format and message negotiation & transmission, respectively.
i) Latency: Latency is defined as the total time taken by an API in the process from the request to the response.
j) Rate-Limiting: The term API Rate-limiting refers to the process of defining the rate at which an end user can access the APIs. In other words, it means restricting the number of requests a user can hit to an API per time.
k) API Throttling: The process of regulating the usage of APIs by users during a particular time period is called Throttling. This can be used for API limiting. For example, you set the limit of 1000 API requests per day. When the user hit the 1001 request, the server will send 429 messages as HTTP status to the end user along with the message, “Too many Requests”.
For more terminology and acronym, refer this site.
Now, as you know what are APIs, are armed with the terminologies and are familiar with the anatomy of the growing API market, let’s dig deeper into the technical part – beginning with how do APIs work?
3. Working of API
Suppose you opened some XYZ app/website to book a flight. You filled the form – you entered the departure and return date, city, flight, and other relevant details – and submitted. With a fraction of seconds, a list of flights appears on the screen along with the price, timings, seat availability, and other details. How this actually happens?
To provide such stringent data, the platform sent a request to the airline’s website to access their database and get relevant data via API. The website responded with the data which API delivered to the platform and the platform displayed it on the screen.
Here, the flight booking app/platform and airline’s website act as endpoints while API as the intermediate streamlining the data sharing process. When talking about communicating the endpoints, the API works in two ways, namely: REST and SOAP (see definition above).
Though both the methods bring effective results, mobile app development companies prefer REST over SOAP since SOAP APIs are heavy and platform-dependent.
To understand the API lifecycle and working process in detail, contact our experts today!
Now coming to the main part – How to develop an API? What tools and technologies to choose? What practices to adopt for an effective API development?
While there are a plethora of tools and technologies equipped into the process of creating an API, the popular tools and products for developing APIs for developers are:
a) Apigee: It is a Google’s API management provider that assists the developers and entrepreneurs to triumph at digital transformation by reestablishing towards an API approach.
b) APIMatic and API Transformer: They offer sophisticated automatic generation tools to build top-quality SDKs and code snippets from API specific formats and transform them into other specification formations, such as RAML, API Blueprint, etc.
c) API Science: This tool is primarily used for evaluating the performance of both internal APIs and external APIs.
d) API Serverless Architecture: These products assist mobile app developers in designing, building, publishing and hosting APIs with the help of a cloud-based server infrastructure.
e) API-Platform: This is one of the open-source PHP framework that is apt for web API development.
f) Auth0: It is an identity management solution used to authenticate and authorize APIs.
g) ClearBlade: It is an API management provider for embracing the IoT technology into your process.
h) GitHub: This open-source git repository hosting service let the developers manage code files, pull requests, version control, and commenting that are distributed across the group. It also let them save their code in private repositories.
i) Postman: It is basically an API toolchain that empowers the developers to run, test, document, and evaluate the performance of their API.
Although the world is full of APIs and APIs, there is still a major gap in utilizing the perks of API. While some APIs make integration to the app a breeze, other turns it into a nightmare. To help you out in ensuring that you build a former one, here are some of the factors related to APIs for developers to consider:
5. Must-Have Features of an Efficient API
a) Modification timestamps/Search by criteria: An API should let the users search data based on different criteria, like a date. This is because it’s the changes (update, edit and delete) that we consider just after the first initial data synchronization.
b) Paging: Many times, it happens that we do not want to see the complete data changed, but just a glimpse of it. In such a scenario, the API should be capable of determining how much data to display in one go and at what frequency. It should also inform the end user about the no. of pages of data remaining.
c) Sorting: To ensure that the end user receives all the pages of data one-by-one, the API should empower the users to sort data as per the time of modification or some other condition.
d) JSON Support/ REST: Though not compulsory, it is good to consider your API to be RESTful (or providing JSON support(REST)) for an effective API development. The REST APIs are stateless, light-weighted and let you retry the upload mobile app process if it fails. This is quite tough in case of SOAP. Besides, JSON’s syntax resembles that of most of the programming languages, which make it easy for a mobile app developer to parse it into any other language.
e) Authorization via OAuth: It is again necessary that your API authorizes via OAuth since it is faster than other methods – you just need to click on a button and it’s done.
In short, the processing time should be minimum, response time good and security level high. It is of paramount importance to put efforts into the best practices for securing your application, after all, it deals with a heap of data.
6. Best Practices for Building the Right API
a) Use Throttling: App Throttling is a great practice to consider for redirecting overflow of traffic, backup APIs and safeguarding it from DoS (Denial of Service) attacks.
b) Consider your API gateway as Enforcer: While setting up throttling rules, application of API keys or OAuth, the API gateway must be considered as the enforcement point. It should be taken as a cop that lets only right users get access to the data. It should empower you to encrypt the message or edit confidential information, and thereby, analyze and manage how your API is being used.
c) Allow overriding HTTP method: Since some proxies only support GET and POST methods, you need to let your RESTful API override the HTTP method. For doing so, employ the custom HTTP Header X-HTTP-Method-Override.
d) Evaluate the APIs and infrastructure: In the current time, real-time analysis is possible to get, but what if API server is suspected to have memory leaks, draining CPU or other such issues? To consider such situations, you can’t keep a developer at duty. However, you can perform this easily via using numerous tools available in the market, like AWS cloudwatch.
e) Documentation: Last but not the least, it is profitable to create an extensive documentation for an API that let other mobile app developers easily understand the whole process and utilize the information for offering better user experience. In other words, a good API documentation in the process of effective API development will lessen the project implementation time, project cost and boost the API efficiency.
Now as you have gained an in-depth knowledge of what are APIs and what factors to consider while developing one, are you interested in API development? If so, reach to our experts.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS ABOUT API DEVELOPMENT
1. What is REST API and SOAP API?
REST (Representational State Transfer) API is a software architectural style that describes a complete set of constraints to be employed for building Web services. Whereas, SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) is a protocol much complex by adding more standards than REST, such as security
2. How do I make a good RESTful API?
Making a good RESTful API is easier when you follow these practices:-
Use Throttling
Considering your API Gateway as Enforcer
Allowing overriding HTTP method
Making a proper documentation
Determine the APIs and infrastructure
3. What is API and types of API?
API (Application Programming Interface) is a collection of instructions, and requirements that let a software or mobile application utilize the features/services of other applications, platform or devices for exceptional services.
There are basically different types of API:-
Web service APIs
WebSocket APIs
Library-based APIs
Object remoting APIs
Class-based APIs
Hardware APIs, etc.
4. What is JSON API?
JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is an encoding scheme created to eradicate the need for an ad-hoc code for each app to interact with servers in a particular manner.
Coding has placed itself as one of the most secure jobs in the current world. The demand is set on a high priority mode for a number of years to come.
This is the reason why more and more people who are even mildly interested in technology are preparing to become coders.
However, even among this stable demand in the job market and the passion to follow the path, a number of people are still thinking twice before getting into it, solely because of the misconception that it would need a degree and years of practice to become a coder and join some glorious app development company.
If you too are the one restricting yourself from realizing your code dream because of this misconception, we have listed down ways that you can learn how to code. A list that has been curated by our team of skilled coders.
Before we get into the ways you can learn how to code, let us look into some of the reasons that are motivating people to learn how to code.
1. What is prompting our generation to take up Coding courses
a. It will be around in the future
When one takes up a course, the idea is to not go with the one whose demand is short lived but go with one that is least replaceable. And, when we talk about the job trends, the one that is going to be around for the foreseeable future and beyond, it is Coding. The tech industry is only going to grow (with many more programming languages coming up) and the only way to grow with it is by joining the club and becoming technical.
b. Demand is much more than supply
The demand for coders is much higher than the number of coders in the industry – a scenario that doesn’t seem to be changing anytime soon.
Having much more demand than the supply comes with its own set of perks. You get to earn much higher than your years of experience and the chance of finding a job irrespective of the geographical boundaries is also much higher.
c. A lot of career options at the back of a strong foundation
If you work on your code foundations today, you will have in front of you a series of career options. Even if you are preparing yourself to be a flappy bird developer, with time you will be able to branch out in coding involved with a number of disruptive technologies like AR/VR, Blockchain, or even AI.
Now that we have seen the reasons that are motivating people across the globe to become coders, let us now look into the ways you can learn how to code, even without a programming language experience or a computer science degree. These are the ways that have been suggested by our team of developers who themselves have developed over 500 apps belonging to a range of different disruptive technologies like Chatbots, AI, and Blockchain, amongst others.
Let’s begin.
2. Ways You Can Learn How to Code Without a Computer Science Degree
Okay, a slight detour again.
Before we get into this journey of learning how to code let me help you finalize a programming language first, the one you should start with.
The basic programming language that I would suggest to start with is JavaScript. The language comes in very handy when you are developing an app – one that can be of any type, no matter how complex. The industry demand for JavaScript developers is extremely high. No matter what job portal you are looking into, you will find a listing for JS developers there.
Also, the JavaScript developer community is an ever growing one. New tools are always coming up in the JavaScript industry, giving you, a beginner, a chance to join the league of developers who come with years of experience in the domain and are yet to explore the new batch of tools.
Once you are adept with JavaScript, expand your learning to a more platform specific language. The present and the near future belongs to Kotlin for Android app developers and Swift and iphone app developers. So, choose a platform that you are even remotely passionate about and invest in its specific language.
Now that you must have gathered an idea of what programming language you would like to delve in further, let us now look into what we gathered here for – to learn how to code when you do not even know its basics.
3. Online Courses to Learn Coding From
Code.org – Their courses are majorly designed for the K-12 students, but anyone who is looking to start fresh in the coding industry can enroll in these courses.
Codecademy – It is a free resource for learning every major web programming language out there in the industry.
Khan Academy – They have a range of topics to meet the learning needs of coders irrespective of their learning level
Learn Swift – If iOS App Development is what you wish to do, the site is your Meccah. It has pages and pages of data that would help you learn Swift.
4. YouTube Channels That Will Help you Code
Learn.code Academy – Topics it Cover – Responsive Design, Sublime Text, Node.js, Backbone.js, Angular.js, Deployment Strategies, etc.
Thenewboston – Topics it Covers – C programming language, Android development, Python, MySQL, etc.
Derek Banas – Topics it Covers – Java, PHP, Ruby, HTML, C++, Python, Android, Assembly language, etc.
5. Blogs you should Follow to Become Better Coders
SitePoint –The blog continuously keeps getting updated with new topics ranging from everything – HTML, CSS, Swift, React.JS, amongst a lot of others.
David Walsh – Managed by Mozilla’s senior developer, David Walsh, the website has a lot of information specific to developers, presented in how-tos, demos, and tutorials.
A List Apart – Have tons of articles for coders irrespective of their expertise level.
SoftwareHow – The blog is a go to the website for anything related to software tools. It comes with a huge collection of guides, tips, and software reviews.
The list would help you immensely at becoming better coders over time. The one thing that you should do though before you drop the idea of learning how to code is at least try one other method of learning, irrespective of what your current mode of learning is.
48% of global consumers accepted that they would rather connect with a company over chat than any other source of contact. 35% of the users would like to see more companies incorporating chatbots. As for the business side of the story, chatbots save around £6 billion per year and a simple chat option in the mobile app brings up the revenue by over 30%.
These are only a snippet of thousands of statistics that are all around the internet and lying on a million office reports hinting towards how chatbot app development has turned out to be the best business decision.
Done right, chatbots can single-handedly make your company approachable and open to business even when you sleep. Done wrong, it leaves users unsatisfied and complaining about how your brand is slow in the logic department.
What helps in making a chatbot effective, besides of course passing all your chatbot success worries to a chatbot app development company, is having a right strategy in place.
1. Have a Purpose
Knowing what purpose your chatbot would solve is the first step in designing a working, revenue-generating chatbot design strategy in 2018.
The last thing that you would want is to join the chatbot world just because every business is on it. While it is true that it benefits a range of different industries, it is also true that not all businesses need it, especially the ones that are working only around a particular geographical location i.e. in the same time zone.
But if yours is a business that would benefit immensely with Chatbots, think of the process that you would like to give your bot the autonomy of. The scale of the process that you are looking forward to leaving in the hands of chatbot will help decide which bot type you have to invest in (more on this later).
2. Conversation Flow
The flow in which your chatbot would converse is one of the most important things for your chatbot design guide to cover.
The ideal situation when it comes to deciding how the conversation should flow is that the bot should start with a general salutation followed by asking questions and then pitching the product when the user put in the respective action words like ‘Tell me More’ or ‘Give more information’.
The biggest mistake that businesses make is pitching in the product as soon as the user becomes active on the website or page when they should go with a more human-like conversation flow.
3. Bot Personality
The only way to make your bot more human-like is to give it a personality. Now when I say personality, I am not implying you to create an avatar and anime man. No, when I say personality, I mean giving it a tone, a difference in the US and UK English, slang, and age-appropriate responses.
Now, in the normal scenario, a business doesn’t have a specific exact type of customer base, so would you keep making bots aiming for each of them to meet specific criteria? The answer is obviously No. What you can do is ask your users’ background and change the initial conversation level of the bot.
4. Give Context From the Beginning
Make the purpose of your chatbot clear from the first two messages itself. Aim for a scenario where your user knows exactly what the bot would be helping them with and have no misinterpreted expectations and then a bad customer service instance.
The first two dialogue to and fro should be enough for your user to know what is to be expected from the chatbot. If you miss this step, the chances are that your bot dashboard will get filled with repeated questions and frustrations of not getting answers.
5. Share before Publicizing
So you have developed an amazing bot that converses with masses effortlessly, specializes in giving the users the exact information that they need, which even varies from context to context. What’s next?
And the answer does not make it live on your website or integrate into your mobile app right away. The answer is to first share it with your in-house teams to see if it’s actually able to answer different questions and different contexts.
By sharing it with the team and taking their feedback, you will be able to track exactly how people are reacting to it and what changes would make the conversation more meaningful.
6. Choose your Words Wisely
The most important element of strategic chatbot development according to chatbot design trend 2018 is choosing the words right. Your copywriting technique should be on point to not just entice the users to start the conversation but keep them hooked enough to convert into your site’s loyal customer or subscriber.
Know that your chatbot copy has the power to make your chatbot a conversion magnet and it should be treated just like that – as a mix of emotions and conversion statements.
So, here were the pointers that would help you draft a killer, high revenue generating chatbot design strategy in 2018. The one that would result in a chatbot that people love to converse with and pay to.
Now that you know what an ideal chatbot should operate like, it is time to look into the three types of chatbots that you should invest in developing once you have your chatbot design guide planned.
The Three Types of Chatbots
1. Menu Based Chatbots
These are one of the most common types of chatbot available in the market today. Using this chatbot, brands give multiple options to the users to select from. These are used mainly when the users are looking for a direct answer.
One of the biggest challenges that businesses face when it comes to menu based chatbots is that the process that users will have to follow to come to the point when they get the desired answer is quite long. They have to click through several buttons and options to come on one point.
2. Keyword Recognition Based Chatbots
These bots utilize the blend of AI and keywords to determine the appropriate response. They lack in performance when they are asked a lot of similar questions with similar sounding keywords, even when the context is different.
A new set of bots are now present in the market that is hybrid. They automatically switch to the menu based type when they are unable to answer users’ queries through AI.
3. Contextual Chatbots
The most advanced of the chatbot family, these bots remember the interaction and its outcome and keeps growing on it to give better result to the users over time. They work strictly on Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence to help users come to a decision.
As they are based on ML and AI technologies, they come with a self-learning ability, which helps in not just customer relationship management but also a positive sales conversion rate.
The ultimate decision of which chatbot type to invest in depends entirely on your business need. If yours is a simple Q&A type app where you aim at giving a quick in and out experience to your users, answering their questions to the point, menu-based chatbot app development is what you should go for. But, in case you have an assistant like mobile app idea, then you will lose your pockets a little and invest in Contextual chatbot development.
Businesses and Entrepreneurs such as you, sometimes spend as high as a million figure to get their application developed and deployed in the stores. The one hope they tie all their effort and money to is generating more than what they earned as revenue from their app.
But, in come reports that over 94% users uninstall mobile apps just after 30-40 days of app install and it hit the businesses hard – Realizing that their app has fallen in the well of those 94% apps.
There are three categories in which you can divide the reasons why users are uninstalling your mobile app –
We will be looking at all the three categories in detail in this article. After all, a clear indication of the problem will only help you with determining how to prevent your mobile app uninstall.
Although, it sounds very obvious but the signs that the app is not developed right are not laid in plain sight. There are a number of issues that businesses ignore to double check when their app is in the development stage, which then goes on to adversely affect the user retention score.
Let us look into them individually so that you know the pointers that you have to pay attention to before you launch that app of yours.
Not Paying Enough Attention to Security
The number one reason that keeps users at bay when it comes to apps that ask for their number, email id or bank detail is the doubt of data breach. Now even if you have kept all the crucial security considerations in mind and practice while developing the app, make it a point that you showcase the badge of security protocol to your users in application homepage, so that they know that their information is secure.
Also, as an added security feature, ensure that the cloud service that you have signed up to save the user data is hack proof. Sit with your mobile app development company and discuss the ways you can make your app tamper proof.
Taking up Way too Much Space on Users’ Device
It is a given but highly ignored fact that your app is not the only application on a user’s device. At any given point of time, users have at least 2 similar app category applications in their smartphone or tablet.
In a scenario such as this, if your app is taking a considerable MB of space on users’ device, you are digging your grave, pretty fast. There are a number of ways to ensure that the app size is small for optimizing the images and videos or manually fixing the app size from the backend. Run your app through those practices before you launch it in the market.
The ‘Application Has Stopped Working’ Message Pops Up A LOT
Nothing annoys an impatient user more than an application that keeps on crashing or asking to run again.
It has been noted that users bear with app hanging or stopping abruptly only till two instances and not more. So, once you start receiving messages or reviews saying that the app hangs a lot, leave everything aside and get it resolved asap.
Look at your code structure and pay extra attention in the app testing to ensure that your app doesn’t hang, or even it does, because of hundreds of queries being generated at the same time, make sure it is an isolated event.
Apart from these three, as long as you have done your testing right and have ensured that the app works like it is supposed to along with making sure that its load time is on point, straight from the application development process, you will be good.
Let us now move on to the next stage, The lack of Ability in Keeping Users Unannoyed, which has less to do with your mobile application development process and more with your incapability to keeping users unannoyed.
Constant Pop-Up Notifications
Sending out notifications saying this and that to your users every hour is one turn off an event. We get it that you want your users to remain hooked to your app, but sending out notifications every hour is more a recipe for pushing them away than of keeping them engaged.
Your notification should be planned. It should come as an effect of user’s movement. Hit their device when they have abandoned your cart or when it’s time for their next lesson. Above everything else, know when to let go. If even after 7 days of zero interaction with the notification, your users are MIA, it is time to let go and stop sending them pop-ups.
Constantly Seeking Rating of the application
If your app is of the kind that constantly asks users to drop a rating in the store, you are headed down the uninstall road. There are hundreds of instances when users are asked to rate an application even when they have left the review days back.
Like notifications, app rating prompt should also be well timed. Ask them to drop in a review when they have achieved something within the app and not when they are either still learning their ways in the app or when they have logged into the app after the longest time.
When you master these two arts and as an added measure, get acquainted with the power of personalization, you will be able to stay in users’ devices for a longer period of time. It’s time to move on to the last element, which you can also call the first nail in your app’s coffin – App Ideation.
Poor Market Research
Chances are that you went into the app game too soon. The time that you should have spent into ensuring that your app idea is different from those in the stores, was spent into wireframing or something else entirely.
Maybe you did not even give enough time into judging whether your app is even solving a real problem or not. Whatever it is that you did in name of less to no market research, is only going to fall hard on you now.
So, here were all the reasons falling into three categories which you can avoid only if you are more cautious during the whole app development process. Now, there can be a number of reasons why users uninstall your app, sometimes as weird as – app was too addictive. The truth is, you cannot always control this. But what you can control is being careful in the whole development and testing process.
Originally incepted as a means to get Play Store to fetch the app listing to place the app higher in the list of category apps, Play Store Optimization has today become a necessary means for businesses to get their apps to rank higher among the list of thousands of similar apps in a category.
Just like your regular Search Engine Optimization mechanisms, Play Store Optimizations also show their effect only when worked from both on store and off store front.
Here is what both the factors entail-
On store factors – These include having the right set of keywords in the app description or its title to enable Play Store search algorithms to fetch them when showing results for a particular category. These features also play a huge role in getting an Android app featured on the store.
Off store factors – These include having enough backlinks coming in from different sources. The sources can be anything – articles, videos, or mentions. Another element that we will be adding here is users’ ratings and reviews. Although, they get uploaded on the store, but the app publishers have no control on them.
For a better understanding of both the factors, read on store factors as the one that the publisher has control on and the off store one as a set of an element that publishers have no control over.
Now that you know the two factors that would directly impact the rank that you are visible on in Play Store search result, let us now get in depth of it – Of getting your app optimized for the Google Play Store to reap the benefits of the time and effort you have spent into getting it developed.
1. Market Research
The first step towards optimizing your app to rule the Play Store chart starts with a thorough market research.
Since the end goal of all your ASO efforts is to get maximum downloads, and app store optimization is 80% about keywords and phrases, you will have to get into your users’ heads to know what they are looking for.
You will have to know who your users are, what are they looking for in an app that they would then move to their home screen and what words are they using to find that application both on search engine and within the app stores.
To understand what is going on in your users’ head, you will have to frequent the place they frequent to show/vocalize their needs.
Once you have their insight, the next entity you will need to analyze in depth is your competitors.
Competitor analysis is as important as knowing your customers’ needs. You will have to gain an understanding of what they are offering to your customers, on what mode, in what context, etc. You will have to pay attention to the power words that they are using in their app description, that are making the users install their app.
Go through their review section and see what experience users are having on their app, visit their Youtube channel or go through their blog sections to know what image they are creating in the market and what their users are liking in their offering as compared to thousand other similar apps.
An insight into both – your customers and your competitors – will show you exactly what your customers are looking for and the words they are using and getting converted with.
2. Keyword Optimization
With a very clear understanding of what your customers are looking for and the standards that your competitors have set, the next stage is to convert those insights into keywords and phrases that your users will search for your app with.
Before we move on the steps to optimize your app description and other app elements on the Google Play Store, let us first look into the process of finding the keywords that you should be putting in your app details page.
There are two ways of finding out keywords to use in your app’s Play Store page –
Use what your competitors are using OR
Go manual and find keywords that the world is using when looking for a product or service in your category.
For the first method, make use of websites like “App Annie” and “Sensor Tower“. Both the websites give you a detailed list of keywords that your competitors are ranking on, which you can copy/borrow/ steal for your own app.
If you are planning to take the manual route, these are the steps that you need to follow –
Step 1: Open your Google Keyword Planner Tool and select ‘Search for new keywords and ad group ideas’ and enter your app domain in the Search bar and click on ‘Get Ideas’. In the list that comes up, do not stress too much about the average monthly searches that are coming up on your query, focus your attention on the ‘Ad Group Ideas’ section. This section will have a list of keywords that users are also looking for or the similar keywords.
Step 2: Use reverse dictionaries available on the internet to get a list of words associated with your keyword.
Step 3: Once you have got the list of keywords ready with you, the next step is to refine the list.
There are three categories on the basis of which you should judge if your keyword is viable enough to get you good ranking on the Play Store or not –
Relevancy with your app idea
Difficulty range under 20
Mid Level Traffic and Search Volume.
These steps would give you a list of keywords that will help you in getting your app’s ranking up in the store along with its visibility and download probability.
Now that you have the refined list of keywords, let us now move on to their usage in your app’s Play Store page.
3. Title
Title is the number one element that needs to be optimized for Play Store. It has a direct impact on both search result and conversion rate. Google has extended the app title character limit to 50 characters since July 2017. To make the most of this space, put in a strong keyword next to the brand name as your app title.
An optimized title can look like any one of these four types –
Brand name: Keyword(s)
Brand name – Keyword(s)
Keyword(s): Brand name
Keyword(s) – Brand name
4. URL
The URL package is another element that can bring in a direct boost in the Play Store ranking number. You can include your keyword in the URL as well to increase its chance at visibility. Remember that you will have to check the Play Store package URL before you publish your app. Once set, it cannot be modified later.
A successful example to prove the point that having keywords in app url impacts its ranking and download probability to a huge extent, is Nintendo’s Super Mario Run game. They have added a very competitive keyword in their URL – Zara, which has made them rank a lot higher than other running games on Play Store.
5. Developer Name
One of the least thought about app page elements which you can incorporate with your keyword is ‘Developer Name’ section. Also, Google saves the Developer History and apps that come with a positive developer history ranks much higher than those who don’t. But coming back to incorporating keywords for making Play Store fetch your app because of your developer name, if you make your primary keyword your developer name, you will be able to rank higher a lot sooner.
6. Short Description
The 80 characters short description section on your app page can easily take your app name up the Play Store ranking list. You should plan the short description in a way that it has the keywords in under 20 characters and explain exactly what your app does differently from the thousands of other similar apps.
The sign of a well crafted short description lies in how seamlessly it blends keywords with the app’s USPs, while giving the users something that would grab their attention in microseconds. To gain users’ attention, a number of brands have started using emoticons in their app’s short description section.
7. Long Description
Play Store App Description section is your place to shine. Unlike Apple, Google offers ample space to its developers to showcase their app, fill in keywords, and convince their users why the app is better than the thousands of similar ones in the market.
In the 4,000 character space that Play Store gives you, make sure that you have entered the keywords and their synonyms in the first line and in the last 5 lines of the description, as that is what will make it searchable.
When drafting your app description, make sure it is well formatted and structured. It should have all the necessary information that would persuade your users to install the app. Feel free to mention your accomplishments, use emojis, have details of the updates you rolled out, and social media profile names for the users to follow through.
8. Icon
In the time when the mobile app users have no time to waste, icons are the first thing that they see before deciding whether to even click on the app detail or not. A clearly distinctive icon is what triggers maximum click throughs. For a business to make a lasting impact on its users, the icon needs to be picture perfect and an exact representation of what the app is about.
The biggest mistake that you can make is uploading a pixelated image because you were unsure of the icon size. Although, your partner mobile app development company will handle this for you, but for the sake of expanding your knowledge, here is the image detail –
32 Bit png
512X512 Dimensions
1024 Kb File Size
There are some things that you need to be wary of when it comes to designing your app icon, such as –
No copying of design and layout,
Avoid having text on the icon photo,
Use the latest design trend present – it can be gradient or line icon or something absolutely fresh in the market.
Lastly, until you become all famous and popular, avoid using icons that are not self explanatory of what the app is about.
9. Feature Graphic
The next visual cue that your users will follow after your app icon is the feature graphic. A well designed feature graphic is not just a stepping stone to taking users to the next stage, but also a major driver of conversion rate.
Google has set two requirements for the app feature image –
24 bit png or jpeg
1024X500 Dimensions
Here’s how you can optimize the feature graphic of your android app
Do not place any necessary information by the bottom or near the borders of the image
Use Large Font Size
Keep changing it according to different schemes or campaigns
Localize the text in your featured image, if any (more into this later in the article)
Continuously keep A/B testing your featured image and its content to see what works with your users and what doesn’t.
10. Video
Paste YouTube URL in the “Promo video” section of your Google Play Store listing to add video to your app page. Videos have become one of the most powerful marketing tools of today’s time when the users are getting less and less patient. One of the coolest things about adding a video in your app page is that the views that you get on your play store listing gets added to your YouTube views count, automatically.
Before you upload a video on your app page, know of these two requirements –
Use an individual YouTube URL instead of the URL of a Playlist or Channel
Make sure that the video is not age restricted and that everyone can view the video.
Lastly, just like you did with your feature image, localize your app video as well to reach a greater user base.
11. Screenshot
Screenshots are your only way to create an impression about your app in front of the users. They provide a direct look into how your app looks and moves. In fact, majority of the onlookers get converted into app installers on the basis of the screens they are shown.
Your screenshots should be the best representation of your app’s features. You can even add texts or highlights on the screens to explain a complicated image. Don’t restrict to uploading just two screenshots, use all the slots that Google has given you. It also helps when your screenshots move from one to other in form of a story, so give it a shot.
Google has laid down a number of guidelines that are to be followed when it comes to uploading screenshots on the page, here they are –
320X384 Dimensions
24 bit png or jpeg
With this, we have now covered all the on-store factors that can up your ranking in the Play Store, and now it is time to move on to the off-store factors, which are not in control of the app publishers.
12. Rating & Review
The first element that has an impact on play store ranking is the rating and review section of your app description page. While you don’t have a direct impact on whether users would like your app or not, you can most definitely make it easy for them to like your app by giving them an app that they would love, by default.
By being active in the review section, you can create an impression that the issues are heard and by constantly adding updates that touches upon those issues will also make you your users’ favorite. But, above all, the only resort to getting higher stars and great reviews is by offering your users an app that they need, that comes bug free, and ultimately is something that offers some value in their life.
An important thing to consider here is that you should at all times be responsive. Don’t let your users think they are unheard or ignored.
13. App Update
Another non keyword related element that has an impact on bringing up the app ranking is App Updates. To be in trend and to keep offering your users something new ever so often, you will have to keep updating your android application. It can be as minor as a bug eradication or can be as major as a UI/UX change.
Although, there is no written time when an app should be updated, but you should aim for updating your app at least once in every 30 to 40 days. And, once you do, your users should be informed of the same. They should know that the app was updated and the details of the new update.
While you can send an email to every user individually, highlighting what the update was about, but the ideal practice is add the details in your app description section under What’s New or Update (version name).
14. App Localization
There are a number of statistics doing round all over the internet, hinting towards how app localization hold the immense potential of bringing in a sharp rise in the app revenue charts. Majority of the Play Store users, as opposed to the common beliefs, belong to non english speaking nations, a section that is majorly ignored when an app is designed, developed, and promoted.
Lately more and more brands are coming up with localization tactics to expand their users base and growth, revenue chart. What it means to localize is not just translating the language from dialect A to dialect B, it means changing everything from videos to visuals according to the audience that is meant to cater.
Suppose yours is a language teaching app, now instead of explaining everything your app is about in English in your screenshot or video or even your feature image, have them designed and developed in a variety of different languages, so that the native speakers get attracted towards the app as well.
15. A/B Testing
There is no single point formula to ranking high on the Play Store listings specially when you are competing with million of other mobile apps. You will have to constantly keep making tweaks here and there to see what is working and what is users not responding to.
What we would suggest is that keep changing your screenshots, app descriptions. Keep shuffling your keyword list and changing your app’s details accordingly. It is only when you will constantly change your app’s look and read, your users would get to see something new on the page, creating a curiosity to install the app again, if uninstalled earlier.
A/B Testing should be a continuous process, you should always remain in touch with your app developers so that you are always in trend when the app users compare you with the thousands of apps in the similar category.
16. App Indexing
The idea is that the maximum traffic you send to your app listing page, the more higher you go up in ranking charts. Now, the process of sending traffic off to your mobile app listing is not an easy one to follow. You will have to promote it in enough places and among a range of different people.
Apart from promotion, you will also have to invest time in getting your app listing page indexed. Two quick ways to make your app indexing ready are –
Focusing on Nouns as keywords
Having related words phrases as well, in addition to the specific seed keywords.
So here was the complete guide of getting your app higher on the ranking charts.
The two takeaways and parting notes that I want you to take along with you as you step in this cut-throat competition are –
A. Choose your Keywords Wisely, go with ones that have medium level traffic and competition and
From running away from Zombies to running after Pokemon, the users are becoming more than avid gamers. The majority of people today are using these apps to shed their weight, live a healthier life and get a perfect figure to flaunt in a swimming suit – and that also without spending a huge amount of money in getting gym memberships and adjusting their daily routines.
According to Flurry statistics, the health and fitness apps have become significantly popular in the past few years. A rise by 330% has been recorded in the adoption of fitness apps in last three years. Besides, it has been observed that users are accessing these applications at least twice a week and at most 10 times a week. And with the advent of wearables like fitness bands, the users are becoming more motivated to use these applications for enjoying their lives healthier. This, as a whole, has driven the demand for fitness apps like Fitbit.
If you belong to the fitness industry, this is a call for you to invest in fitness application development and leverage huge benefits from this lucrative opportunity. But before you begin with, you must be familiar with the features that can make your app popular like Fitbit app, about which we will discuss in this blog.
Features Your Fitness App Must Have
There are different types of fitness mobile applications – there are weight loss apps, nutrition and diet apps, on-demand personal trainer apps, exercising and workout apps, and so on. To decide the features, you must determine the type of app you want to develop firstly. However, the following can be considered as the basic features that can be included in all the types of application:
1. Account Creation
As fitness apps are for serving individuals, personal account creation is the foremost feature to consider. The end users must be facilitated with the opportunity to have an individual account where they can feed their personal data, choose all the elements/facilities they want, and track their journey conveniently. It is advisable to keep the profile creation process simple and seamless. The process should not be time-consuming and complicated. The best way to provide effective account creation services is to let the users sign up not only by email, but also by using social media credentials. This will ease the process while helping you to gather the required information and use. from this, if you are designing a fitness application with subscription options, let users store billing information and pay easily via payment gateway integrated into your mobile application.
2. Social Media Sharing
Who doesn’t like to brag about his achievements on social media platforms? We all do it, right? Because of the same reason, social media sharing should be in your fitness application feature checklist. When the users could share their goals and achievements within the app, they will feel good about using the app and do ‘word of mouth’ marketing. Besides, people in their social media networks will come to know about your app and look forward to using it, which means cost-effective brand awareness and marketing.
3. Design
While designing a fitness app, the mobile app developers must ensure the simplicity, usability and interactivity. The design of the app must not be confused or the procedure must not be time-consuming as it would affect the user’s interest. The clickable and minimalistic icons should be considered for adding to the home screen so that the user could easily reach the different sections. The screen must be presented in the form of a sheet to help users easily find what they have done, what they are doing and what they have to do so as to achieve their target. The app should be interactive, gesture-focused and based on the color psychology, i.e., calm colors must be added to generate positive energy.
4. Personalization/Setting Targets
Every user has different body features, needs and expectations. Providing them with the same fitness course won’t be favorable. So, it is vital to facilitate them with the service of personalization. Let them set their own targets and timeline, decide which exercise/activity they want to practice and when, what supplements they will intake during this course, and so on. When fitness apps provide personalized features, users tend to be more consistent, and thus, the app goes viral.
Apart from this, you can also add VR technology into your application – allowing smartphone users to create a VR fitness room and workout in groups.
5. Notification System
A missed workout can hamper the user’s enthusiasm as well as interaction with your application. So, it is vital for every fitness app development company to invest in the notification system. With a perfect notification system, you can prompt users to use your applications regularly. Besides, it can provide you extensive know-how with which you can understand the user behavior and deliver a better experience. However, bear in mind not to push too many notifications that annoy users (the frustrated users would definitely leave your application for never returning back).
6. Gamification
Music in the gym and fitness stations make losing calories more a fun, right? What if you could get the same feel in a mobile application? With the concept of gamification, you can easily add fun elements to your app processing, making it more engaging. By incorporating different elements like Badges, Rewards, Leaderboards, and Progress bar, you can increase the user acquisition and retention rate.
7. Geolocation and Wearable Integration
If you are developing an outdoor fitness app, these two technologies are must to integrate into your application development process. Geolocation functionality will let the user know the path, traffic and minimal time required for going through the track. It will also help them to track the user activities such as no. of steps taken, cycling, swimming, etc. With this data collected using GPS, you can easily calculate and share the insights gained, because of which the users would start appreciating your application.
While integrating your app into wearables like smartwatches and bracelets will empower you to monitor user’s steps, heartbeat rate, pulse rate in real-time and provide valuable advice using these insights. Tip: There are various public APIs and developer’s kit for integrating wearables into your fitness app, like Misfit, Garmin Wellness and Pebble. Determine which one is apt for your app processing and look forward to using it.
8. Chat Feature
With a chat feature, users will be able to interact with a team of fitness experts and get the best-customized solutions related to their health and fitness concerns. Besides, the users will be able to interact with other fitness freaks and create daily challenges based on their potential and needs. This way, the chat feature will boost user engagement and app success ratio.
9. Audio/Video Guide
Amp the workout experience with an audio/video guide. A guide, just like an instructor, will help the fitness application users to understand the right way to do exercise and workout. This will lessen the risk of injuries due to inappropriate postures, boost their experience and motivate them to perform exercises daily.
10. Activity Log
Recording the daily interaction of the app with the user is also a crucial factor to consider while designing a health and fitness mobile application. The recorded stats inform fitness freaks how much calories they have reduced and how much time is it required to reach their decided goal. This supercharges them to be more active and workout religiously.
Tip: To speed up the development process and cut down the cost, employ Google Fit APIs and HealthKit to access health and fitness related data.
11. Data Security
Remember the data breach case of Strava app? The app aggregated the US military men sensitive information to provide personalized fitness and workout services. However, shared the information publicly without their consent. This incident has turned the smartphone users more conscious about the security and privacy policies of the mobile applications they use, which implies you need to work on the data privacy and security aspect.Optimize your app performance and ensure that there’s no data leakage point so as to win the trust of mobile users and prompt them to use your application. Also, make it certain that your app follows the guidelines of HIPAA and other such health privacy compliances.
12. Multi-device synchronization
Just like Fitbit, you can also embed multi-device synchronization feature in your application. This feature will be highly appreciated when the user does not have the synchronized fitness tracker but want to workout. Allowing them to sync another device will make it easier for them to practice religiously and reap the benefits. This will boost customer loyalty.
13. Reviews
The reviews section is of utmost importance to both the users and developers. By collecting feedbacks, the developers can easily find out what challenges users are facing while using the app, what are the glitches in the fitness application and how can they work on improving the customer experience.
Now, as you know the features that could make your fitness app popular and useful as Fitbit, take no time to plan the process and invest in the development process. If you already have the plan ready but are confused at the costing, Anteelo team would love to assist you. Our healthcare app development experts will understand your market needs and suggest the best tech stacks to include in your development project along with outlining the cost to build a fitness application.
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