Daily Hope came with us with a problem: fix their app, make it better to use, and help them raise the rating above the copycat apps in the store. This is how we did it.
Apps are tricky to work with.
Stores like Google Play and the App Store are host to a staggering number of apps, so when it comes to making sure your app is ranking well, the first thing you need to do is make sure it runs the way it should. For Daily Hope, that was the first hurdle, and that was the one they needed help with.
So they reached out to us.
Mobile App
iOS App
Android App
Android App
and iOS App
Daily Hope is Pastor Rick Warren’s proprietary app and it was created to make it easier for Pastor Rick’s listeners to follow along his daily devotional messages and group studies. When the Daily Hope team reached out to us, the app had spawned a few clones in the app store that were ranking higher, and better, in the store than the original, and they wanted us to help them boost the original Daily Hope app above the copycats.
We spoke over email on March 28, and a day later, we gave them a proposal they were happy to move forward with.
It had an unskippable intro video that played every time the app launched, the text was too small, and it was generally difficult to use and read for most of their older clients. At the time, the app was generating really negative feedback on the store, and Daily Hope wanted to release an update that fixed those problems.
With apps, time is always playing against you, and that was the case for Daily Hope. We had three months to get the app under control and usable, and to try and generate some better feedback to combat the copycat apps on the store.
We always like to start in discovery and research mode, where we look into what’s been done and how we can improve on the existing work. A big part of the process is collaborating with our clients to make sure that they understand what they’re getting, and, once we have an idea, we work on ‘wireframes’ so they can experience the changes in real time.
The initial problem was the unskippable video. Nobody wants to watch the same introduction video every time that they open an app, so that needed to be changed. Users could opt into watching it or to skip it if they wanted. Another was the small text - the client understood that most of their user-base was older, and they really wanted a text slider that would allow them to increase the text size and make it easier for their user base to read.
Throughout the troubleshooting, we kept in contact with the client; they got daily updates on what was being done, how, and what we were planning on implementing on the technological side to improve their app from the ground up, and what new features we could come up with to really bring the app together.
We added an RSS-style feed that linked back to their wordpress site and updated the app with new content, and we worked on a donation button to take advantage of Giving Tuesday, a big donation event they hosted yearly. We also made it a lot easier to access by adding a landscape mode for tablet users to make it even easier to read and navigate the app.
100% would work on this app again; it taught us some really interesting ways to work with custom RSS feeds and to work within really small time-frames. Our focus was getting the app out quickly enough that Daily Hope could change the impression it had on the app store, which we managed to do within three and a half months.
Pushing out a basic model first and then adding more intricate features at a later date was key to solving big problems in such a short time-frame and making sure that the client could see some progress fast.
At the time we took over, Daily Hope average 3.2*/5, based on a total of 11 ratings, and it now stands at 4.6*/5* based on a total of 96.
