When it comes to app development there are many different techniques that you can use to make a mobile application more robust and provide a fantastic user experience. Here are five tips that you can start to implement today to make your app better.
1. Provide user friendly error handling
One item which doesn’t seemed to be talk allot about in mobile coding circles is how do you handle errors on an application? In my personal experience I have had apps that open and just close immediately, just sit there and become unresponsive when you perform an action or give me some sort of weird error which didn’t make any sense. You should have good error handling in any function that you are performing in your app. This is especially true if you are connecting to an external service like a server database or using a social network to authenticate your users. Also you should have error handling in place when you are reading or writing to the phones internal data store. I find it a bit odd that Swift didn’t include a try catch implementation which makes error handling much easier. Microsoft uses the try catch syntax with C# and it makes it easy to detect the error and report something useful and non-geeky back to your end user. What you can do is detect an error in a function and simply write some sort of user friendly message back to them in a label control.
2. Provide a Contact Developer Function
Make it easy for your users to send you an email to report issues or tell you what they think of your application. This doesn’t have to be anything fancy, just open a new email with your email address in the “to” field and subject line so you know which app that the email was generated from. This is also a good way to get enhancement requests from your users on things your app is lacking to make it better.
3. Improve Your App Icons
Often an icon is the first thing people will see when they are searching the app store for a new app to download. If you didn’t make your icon something unique or eye catching it may be why your app is being passed over and the user to download your competitor’s app. You can go to 99Designs.com to get many possibilities for your new app icon designs and you can pick the one you like the best.
4. Add social sharing in your app
Have a function where your users can help you get the word out for the app. Put images somewhere in your app to share on Facebook and Twitter and other social networks. Think about ways you can incentivize shares. If you have a game type app limit the users per day and offer to get them more users for free if they share the app on the social networks.
5. Review your feedback and fix errors
I left the worst one for last! You should be reviewing your user’s feedback on the app stores and fixing any bugs that the users are reporting.
6. Bonus: Add a review function
Another item that would be pretty easy to implement is to have the users click on something to go to your listing in the app store for the app and add a review. Most people will not go back to your app after they downloaded it if you don’t have a button or some type of function in your app to ask them to do this.
Hopefully these six items gave you something to think about to make any of your mobile applications better. Please let me know what your thoughts are about this post by adding comments below.
