John’s stomach churned. He just read the retention numbers on the iOS app he recently released. They were bad. Worse than ever before. He gazed out of his office window as if the answers were swirling in the wintery abyss above LaSalle Street. Hundreds of thousands of dollars and countless meetings, and for what?
Read MoreWhy would Instagram hide the ability for users to see the number of likes on a post? The answer is simple: They are trying to make Instagram the “safest place on the internet,” which means their product should match that vision.
But, what’s interesting about it is how they are going about this change. Instead of a previous culture of “move fast and break things,” Facebook and its group of apps have turned into experimentation.
Read MoreOnce upon a time a hamburger restaurant called McDonald’s shared its success with the world via two-digit counters on its storefront signs that showed how many billion hamburgers it had served to date. Virtually every shop had one and from the 1950s into the 1990s the counter slowly ticked up periodically--20 billion, 50 billion, 65 billion, 80 billion.
Read MoreWhy does Google personalize your YouTube recommendations?
Why does Facebook show you only recommended posts and not every post from all your friends in the order in which they were posted?
The simple answer to that is this: because the data told them you would like this.
Read MoreOnce we made the shift to building products with a focus on product analytics, event tracking, and testing features, we made generous leaps in creating product ROI. Our clients’ apps were selling more, app ratings were going higher, and the number of customer support calls started decreasing.
Read MoreI’ve personally seen the mobile app industry evolve significantly over the past 10 years. It looks something like this:
Read MoreGoogle’s 9th I/O developer conference has officially wrapped up and we here at Vokal have compiled our impressions of the various announcements and sessions. Be sure to check back in to Vokal Labs for our Apple WWDC coverage.
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