App User and Market Research: Do You Know Your User Base?
Without user insight, your app could be in trouble
It doesn’t matter if your app is for internal company or widespread public use — you have to know your users.
They might be employees, students, children, pet lovers, delivery people...the list could go on.
Whatever your app is and however small or large the user base might be, the point is, it was created for users. And you need to know and understand them. -Click to Tweet
If you’ve reached the point of marketing your app or planning out a campaign, you’ve probably (hopefully) already started learning about your audience. After all, if you don’t know who you’re marketing to, how on earth will you reach them?
But let’s take a step back. Marketing is important, no matter who you’re trying to reach (even change-averse employees need to be marketed to on a new internal app). Making sure you know and deeply understand users during your app’s build stage is even more vital, though.
You can market a product, but if that product doesn’t work exactly how your specific users need it to, you’re going to have problems.
Now, before you think you’ve got this part taken care of, stop for a moment and think with me...
Do you know who your users are because you’ve researched, spoken to, and worked with them? Or do you know who they are because you came up with an idea you think would apply to them?
It’s okay if you don’t have the “right” answers yet.
It’s not okay to keep moving forward with the assumption that your app will solve a problem when you haven’t done any digging.
The Importance of Understanding Your App's Users
When building an app, you can account for your users in a multitude of ways. But you can’t just do it by assuming you know what they want or who they are.
Let’s say your app solves a problem for people who are searching for online courses on various topics. It pulls together a collection of courses and allows users to search by topic, enroll, and complete them right on the platform.
That idea might have evolved due to your own frustrating search for a broad collection of online courses, so naturally, you are your target audience. Right?
Not quite…
What happens when you, the 40-year-old, degree-holding adult with a job, launch this app, only to find out that the people interested in using it are non-degree seeking high school graduates looking for skills they can use online to make money.
The premise of the app stays the same, but the user base changes completely.
You can imagine how a young person in their early twenties might interact with an app differently than someone in their forties or fifties. It’s not hard to see how the design and UX of the app would need to be different. On top of that, the content would have to change, and even the calls to action would require an update.
Of course, that example is extreme. It assumes your intended user base ends up being entirely different. But even if your user base turns out to be what you expected, and even if you have an idea of what those users might want, you still have to dig deeper.
Are your users male or female? Is there a split? What color scheme is most attractive to that demographic?
How old are your users? How long have they been using apps? A person who’s not used to navigating an app might not know to “hover there” or “click this icon” intuitively like a person who’s used apps for years.
Your UX should hinge on the level of comfort your users have when navigating technology. What’s intuitive to you might be completely foreign to someone else.
And what about money? Does your app involve payments in some way? The price points, payment gateways, and even the way you display costs or fees should all depend on your specific users.
You might have the perfect solution for a group of people, but do you truly know those people well enough to create an app they’ll want to use?
How to Understand Your Target User Base
You can do endless research online about target markets, demographics, users, and more. You can find out where your ideal users are from, how much money they make, and what their biggest pain points are.
And you should...
But you should also talk to them.
There will never be a method for gathering information more useful than going straight to the source. You can’t top it.
By talking to your potential user base, you can glean information you’d never even think to search for online.
Let’s say you have a fitness app that lets you track workouts, log reps and weights, and monitor your nutrition. You constantly run into the problem of being able to manage this information in one convenient place, so you think it’d be a great app idea.
Based off of your own habits, you’ve come up with a basic user persona:
25-36 years old
75% female
Works out 3 times per week
Does mainly cardio
But then you start talking to people at the gym. And the people who fit your demographics don’t even track their workouts or nutrition — not because they can’t, but because they don’t really want to. They order Hellofresh, browse Facebook while they’re on the treadmill, and hate the idea of logging workouts.
Instead, you find out that most people looking for an app like that are:
23-34 years old
85% male
People who workout 5-6x per week
Through talking to them, you also find out these potential users get really irritated when the buttons on their fitness apps aren’t big enough to easily tap during the middle of a workout when they’re sweaty and shaky.
You realize that, on top of being able to log nutrition, they want a way to track their daily supplement intake so they never forget what they have and haven’t already taken.
You also learn that these people hate having to look at their phone to see how much time they have left in an exercise. They want a voice in their ears to tell them.
Without talking to real, live people, could you ever intake that kind of valuable information — the kind of insight that could completely differentiate your app from all the others out there?
Probably not.
But wait, what if you can’t speak directly to ideal users? Find them online. Reach out to bloggers or other influencers in your prospective niche. Pick their brains. Ask for help.
Creating a User Persona
You need to know your users inside and out, and your app needs to reflect that — in the design, UX, features, and more.
If you don’t create your app for a specific type of person, you’ll have a hard time fitting into a niche, standing out in your market, or claiming an identity. The easiest way to build and create for the right type of person is to come up with a user persona.
Successful marketing relies on being able to make people feel like a company or brand is speaking directly to them.
Ferraris aren’t just for people who are shopping for a car. They’re for people who want to look rich, show off, and feel elite — people who want to spend a lot of money on a car for the wow factor...not people looking for something to take their kids to soccer practice in.
The design of a Ferrari is different from a Honda. It’s made for a completely different type of person.
And you can bet Ferrari has created one of the most in-depth buyer personas out there. Because it helps them create the right product for the right people.
Your app should be the same.
When creating a user persona, you’re essentially putting together a profile for one specific person who embodies all of your users. You give that person a name, a job, and specific characteristics relative to your ideal users. And then you use the persona to help guide you while building your app.
By building your app for one specific person, you’ll help future users feel like it was created for them and them alone. And that’s something they won’t put down easily.
What goes into a user persona?
Things like:
Name
Job title
Age
Gender
Location
Income
Hobbies
Daily schedule
Technical skill level
Biggest frustrations
Greatest fears
Favorite social networks
Education background
Most recent purchase
Favorite website
Sounds detailed, doesn’t it?
It should be. You're creating an entire person.
The more specific you can get, the better experience your users will have. Imagine how much they’ll appreciate being sent notifications at the right time throughout their day, being able to log in with the right social networks, seeing relevant information from websites they visit or of issues local to them, and so on.
The more personal you can make your app, the more it will stand out in a market that’s quickly growing more and more impersonal.
There are countless free tools to create personas online (you can also use a Google doc or spreadsheet). If you want a visual tool, try User Forge.
How else can you learn about users?
Talking to potential users is invaluable. But you should also be pouring through data and statistics online because there’s a wealth of knowledge freely available to you for this exact purpose.
There are tons of tools out there to help with market research. Hubspot has put together a helpful list of 17 of them, which I encourage you to read through and use.
Use research to your advantage
If you’re at this stage in the game, conducting the right research can drastically change your app’s path, potentially saving you time, money, and a lot of hassle.
Instead of moving forward with your gut instincts, research will either support your ideas and decisions or show you where the faults are.
It’s hard to face the fact that your app might not be as well thought-out as you originally imagined. It’s easy to get caught up in the hype of an idea. By putting in the work and validating your app, users, and strategy, though, you’ll be leaps and bounds ahead of where you started.
Moving forward without research is guesswork. Sure, it’s easier, but won’t things be a lot simpler when you don’t have to keep guessing later on? When you can look at the facts, implement validation, and move forward with confidence in your decisions?
Dig deep into your market. Get out and talk to people. Create an app you don't just hope people will love. Give them one you know they'll rave about.