How to Optimize Your App’s Navigation to Increase User Retention

When it comes to mobile app user retention, the first seven days are crucially important. During this initial period, your app’s new users will either begin to associate your app with pain and suffering or have an enjoyable and memorable experience. In other words, the user experience (UX) determines whether they keep using your app or delete it from their phone.

That’s why onboarding and user retention go hand in hand because in-app onboarding is one of the best ways to increase user retention and make sure your users return.

However, not all apps have great onboarding experiences. Many fails because they don’t consider user retention when implementing UI design practices or designing their app. But with a little forethought and planning, you can easily avoid these common pitfalls when designing your app’s onboarding process.

What is Onboarding?

Onboarding refers to the process of “boarding” a new user of your product into the core functionality and features of your platform. The onboarding process should be designed to make it as easy as possible for new users to progress and achieve results, whether signing up for your SaaS product, creating an account on your eCommerce website, or installing your mobile app.

In many ways, onboarding is a mini-retention strategy all in itself. If you see onboarding as guiding your users through the first experience they have with your app; then retention can be considered the long-term engagement that comes after that. In other words, retaining your existing users is just as important as onboarding new users.

Defining User Retention

User retention is the percentage of users that continue to use your app after the first session. It’s one of the most vital indicators of app success and directly impacts your app’s lifetime value (LTV). User retention is also a key indicator of app health and is a major factor in measuring app engagement.

User retention is one of the most important KPIs to track for mobile apps. After all, it’s the only way to measure your app’s growth and improvement over time. Moreover, an app’s retention rate can be used to calculate its LTV. This will help app developers make better business decisions and stay ahead of the competition.

What is a good retention rate for mobile apps?

Mobile apps typically have a 30-day Retention Rate of 42% and a 90-day Retention Rate of 25%, though exact standards vary by industry. The average 30-day rate varies from 27% to 43% depending on the industry, while for better-performing apps, the range is 32% to 66%.

Although the typical 90-day retention rate is about 20%, it’s advisable to aim for 25% or more, depending on your sector.

What is the meaning of mobile app engagement?

mobile app engagement is all about how mobile app users interact with the app, meaning whether they find it helpful or not, which will determine app failure or success.

Further, mobile app engagement is determined by various factors:

• The total number of app downloads: The more downloads the app will have, the better the chances of app success or retaining users.

• Lifetime revenue: This is the total revenue your business earns till it stops using your mobile app. And it is calculated as a monthly average of either advertising revenue or purchase value per user.

• Session interval: Session interval is basically a time between two consecutive sessions of your mobile app, which displays how your mobile app is opened by people and used.

• Current app users: It means the total number of people who use your mobile app on a daily basis which is a very crucial metric for user retention.

• Session length: This is basically how much time your customers are spending on your mobile app per user. If the session is longer, it will be better.

3 Mistakes That Decrease User Retention

There are many ways to increase user retention, and there are also just as many ways to decrease it. Here are some common mistakes that can decrease your app’s retention rate.

• Wrong Audience: Before designing the onboarding process, you need to ensure your app is geared toward the right audience. If you’ve chosen the wrong audience, your app’s onboarding experience and user retention metrics will be negatively affected.

• Bad User Experience: The onboarding experience is crucial for your app’s retention rate. If your users don’t understand how your app works, they’ll be more likely to churn. Because retention is such an important metric, it’s essential to focus not only on the onboarding process but also on your app’s first few days.

  

• Lack of Retention Features: To increase your app’s retention rate, you’ve got to put retention features (like push notifications and in-app messages) to work. You risk losing your users and having a lower retention rate without any retention features.

Strategies to Increase User Retention

To increase user retention, you must first understand why your users are churning. Once you’ve done that, you can then turn to the best onboarding strategies to mitigate churn, improve your retention rates, and increase your app’s LTV.

• Create a Compelling Value Proposition: The value proposition is the promise you make to your users about what your app can do for them. It’s a statement that clearly states how your app solves a problem, saves the user time, or provides them with an enjoyable experience.

  Create a Strong First Impression: Your app’s first impression is the first thing your users will see, so it must be positive. You can do this by designing a simple and intuitive onboarding process.

  Implement Retention Events: Retention events are particular in-app messages that prompt users to take specific actions. You can increase retention rates by using these retention events to prompt your users to complete certain tasks.

What is Mobile App Navigation?

In general, navigation involves showing the path to your goal. When we discuss mobile app navigation, we refer to the same idea: direction. Navigating users through a mobile app to get them from one location to another is known as navigation.

All you need to do is guide your mobile app users and help them come across the vital buttons, letting them go where you want to.

Popular Mobile App Navigation Patterns That Will Make Your App Stand Out

Here are a few mobile app navigation practices that you must follow:

• Hamburger Menu: The designers’ community is still uncertain about the concept of a hamburger menu. Those who prefer it and want to eliminate it from the process of designing are in the majority. The hamburger menu is a great UI/UX design concept because it allows the audience to benefit from the extra space on the screen by linking to the three lines.

• Card Navigation: Using cards to present multiple elements such as text, pictures, and links all in one place is one of the best app design practices. They are available in every shape and size.

• Gesture-based Navigation: Since the introduction of the touchscreen mobile phone, gesture-based navigation has dominated the market. Users can swipe in any direction they want, and this has proved to be a successful strategy.

• Tab Navigation: On Android apps, tabs are found at the top, whereas on iOS apps, they are found at the bottom. A tab typically holds a variety of options that lead users to the desired page or screen.

• Floating Navigation Button: Floating icons are circular and do not float over the interface. The floating action button (FAB) triggers the primary action in your mobile app’s UX/UI design, which is, to say, the primary action in your mobile app’s UX/UI design. On a mobile screen that is stock-still, all the user can do is click the FAB and go in the right direction.

• 3D Touch: Apple, a technological behemoth, has introduced 3D touch, which provides immediate selections from the iPhone home screen. It provides a shortcut to the navigation that displays the menu of choices for the selected item.

  Leading the market in terms of technology, 3D touch is now present on various intelligent devices, giving designers more freedom to include it in the navigation of their apps. It also provides a useful preview method.

• Vocal Navigation: Voice navigation is still a growing technology, but it is undoubtedly promising. It is still not as widely utilized as other UI patterns. By using this technology for your user base, you might profit from it. Users will need to provide their voice input for it in order to have their voice recognized.

• Bottom Navigation: Bottom navigation is the opposite half of the coin. It is acceptable to assume that these two navigational strategies differ slightly. However, the major benefit of using the bottom navigation is how easy it is on the thumbs or fingers of users.

• Full-screen Navigation: Up until this point, we prioritized navigation practices that used the least amount of screen real estate. However, full-screen navigation suggests a whole different idea.

• Top navigation: The top of the screen features a bar with the main symbols in this navigation scheme. Since everything is on top and can be further explored, this design is rather simple for the user’s eyes to navigate.

UI Design Practices That Every Designer Must Follow

• Readability of Content Matters: Poorly designed applications can negatively impact user experience. Inadequate content readability can interfere with a user’s ability to navigate an app.

• Choose the Order of Your Navigation Mindfully: The order of your navigation menu is usually neglected, though it is the most important factor in shaping users’ impressions of your app. By consciously setting the sequence of your navigation menu, you can express your objectives.

• Users’ Hand Positioning: The positioning of users’ fingers and hands makes a huge difference. Imagine that you are clicking on a random link over and over again, but it doesn’t open; your experience would be terrible in no time.

  Icons and buttons must be large and clear enough so that users can easily navigate through the app. If this aspect is neglected, the team’s hard work in creating such a comprehensive app experience might be for naught.

• Decluttering the Screen Space: Sometimes, designers make a mess of their designs by focusing too much on visual appeal. At other times, the most effective method to make the application look attractive is to leave it clean. You must follow app design practices to avoid making the application’s design look too congested.

• Add a Search Bar: Even though the navigation design is pretty simple and clear, there is still a small chance that users will look for help.

  Make sure to provide your audience with a personalized experience, as one shortcoming is enough to decrease user engagement. Always take care of everything that makes users satisfied.

Conclusion

Businesses now have a never-before-seen chance to communicate with leads, prospects, and customers while also ensuring that their most important material reaches the right demographics, regardless of whether a desktop PC, laptop, tablet, or mobile smartphone is being used.

Companies need to realize that mobile devices have their own subtleties and limitations and are not just desktops on wheels in order to get the most out of the mobile experience. The navigation practices or say style, layout, and design of the mobile application must take into account various elements, including the user’s comfort level and the device’s capabilities, before developing the navigation design.