How to Market a Mobile App: Professional Design

The next phase in the How to Market a Mobile App series was to try a whole new look and feel. While I feel like the design of This to That was actually pretty good, it's obvious design is not really my strong suit. I hired a professional design company that reworked my icon for about $150.

I dropped the new icon into the game and had my wife play with the This to That theme generator for a while. She came up with what is now the current This to That default theme. We are pretty pleased with the way it turned out and it appears users are too.

Promotional Images

Another thing we changed were the promotional images that show up with the app on the app store. I had reviewed dozens of my favorite apps to see which ones I thought had the most compelling promo images. I noticed I was most enticed by promotional images that featured interesting design with the application screenshot embedded in the image (rather than the whole image itself).

I had tried my hand at this kind of design and these are what I had before:

In an effort to try something new (and to get a new release out faster), I decided to replace these with simple screenshots. You can see them on the This to That on iTunes page. I may have my designers throw together some new promotional images if I start to get enough data about new downloads that I'll be able to share any significant observations about their effectiveness.

Results

The new graphics don't appear to have had a huge impact on new users. It looks like about 10% - 20% more downloads than before. None of the current users have complained in comments or ratings so that's probably a good sign really. I think the most interesting statistic I've observed this time around is in session duration.

It appears whatever I added between 3.5 and 4.1 was displeasing to users. We went from an average of 4 minutes per session to about 2 minutes per session. 4.2 brought us back up and 5.0 and 5.1 have leveled us off at about 3 minutes per session, but almost all of our players now play every day.

A few other observations

• Very few people attempt to play multiplayer
• Many players open the drawer; very few swipe it
• Since we moved the help button, more people click help
• There are very few social sharing events
• Most common incorrect words: TOOS, BEAS, SEAP, BONS, BAIN

Next Steps

I have a release ready to go in hopes that we get more reviews on the app store (hopefully positive too). We have always had a feedback button in the app, but at some point the link broke so presently it takes you to the app store but not to the app's page. To fix this, we started using appirater. On a related note, I recommend using cocoapods for iOS app dependencies.