The longer your mobile app can retain users, the more likely it is to convert them into paying customers.
Many app developers focus on acquisition as their primary metric of marketing success. They spend a huge amount of money on acquiring new users, all while doing little to ensure existing users have a positive experience.
The end results are huge costs and very little retention. In fact, the average retention rate for a mobile application is so low that 30 percent — a figure most marketers would scoff at — is seen as a major indicator that an app is “sticky.”
There are several factors involved in retaining users. One is value. Another is quality. If your app lacks quality and performs poorly, crashes frequently or just doesn’t work as it should, you’ll find it extremely tough, if not impossible, to retain users.
Below, we’ve listed five quality assurance testing mistakes that cause apps to struggle with user retention, rack up bad reviews and lose out in the long term.
Automated Testing
When done right, test automation is a simple but effective way to make your QA testing process more efficient. When done wrong, it’s a way to let bugs slip into your application without your QA testing team ever knowing.
Since testing is a repetitive process and not all tests are equally important, using some amount of automated testing in your QA process is excusable. However, overusing automation can lead to debilitating bugs and performance issues making their way into your final release.
Instead of automating simple tests, outsource them to the crowd. Our crowdtesting platform lets you tap into thousands of testers in the United States and abroad for your tests, all at a cost that makes manual QA testing justifiable.
Poor UX Testing
There’s more to quality than just ensuring your app is bug free. Users will rarely waste time on an app that delivers a poor user experience, making it essential that you include UX testing in your pre-release testing process.
From your app’s navigational menu to buttons and links, text readability, colors, animations and more, it’s important to thoroughly test your app’s user experience before release. It only takes a single UX issue to drive users away from your app and cause your retention rate to nosedive.
Inefficient Test Planning
Imagine you’re the QA test manager for a social networking startup. Your app helps people keep in touch, make friends and socialize. You need to allocate resources for QA testing between two different parts of your app:
- A private messaging system that lets users keep in touch, share photos and video, send GPS coordinates and more.
- A profile feature that lets users apply filters to their profile photos.
The first feature is used by 80% of your users; the second is used by less than 5%. Which of the two features needs to be tested the most thoroughly?
QA testing isn’t just about finding and fixing bugs — it’s also about making sure the right parts of your app are subject to the most testing. Plan your QA testing process carefully to focus on the “essentials” of your app and you’ll have the greatest positive impact on user retention.
Dependence on Emulators
We’ve written before about the dangers of depending on emulators for your QA testing. Using emulators lets you simulate a huge variety of devices, but you’ll never get the exact same type of performance as the real thing.
Emulators may not perfectly match the quirks of real hardware. Worse yet, the hardware and software you use to run an emulator could introduce its own bugs into your testing process. A good QA testing process might use emulators, but it should never depend on them.
Faulty Analysis
How thorough is your analysis and reporting? Do you mark QA tests as a “pass” or “fail,” or do you go into greater detail to diagnose and describe why a test failed and how it can be fixed for future releases?
Once you’ve gathered data from your QA tests, it’s important to report accurately. Rate bugs so that the most severe can be fixed first, and analyze your results to identify key points that your team can improve.
It’s easy to write off reporting and analysis as less important than testing itself. In doing so, you create the potential for serious bugs to be marked as minor, problems to go unnoticed and bugs — both big and small — to go completely unfixed.
Avoid QA testing fails with MyCrowd
We’ve built a powerful crowdtesting platform that lets you tap into thousands of testers located in the United States and around the world. Run your first test with MyCrowd now to find and fix bugs that could hurt your mobile app’s retention rate.
