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Frank
Frank

Posted on • Originally published at productific.com

Feature voting for your mobile app

App development is fun. And it sucks because it's a higly competitive market, only the best mobile apps succeed and prosper. Building what users really want is essential for survival and success.

Choosing the best feature to build next is a difficult task. Many dependencies are to be considered, any feature-decision comes with advantages and drawbacks.

Choosing the best feature to build next is a difficult task

Besides all the uncertainties there is also good guidance available: your active users.

They use your product on a daily basis. They know what provides value to them and how your product can improve. Letting your users suggest improvements and vote for new features is a great way of engaging and including their perspective. After all, you and your users share a common goal: improving the product.

User feedback

Feature voting gives you the ability to see which improvements are desired most - by real users. By voting for new features users shape a roadmap for your app that optimizes user experience and product success at the same time. A product with happier users is a better product and a better product leads to greater business growth.

Tool support drives growth. Some general purpose collaboration tools like Trello and Asana are optimized for "love at first sight": you start using it, like it immediately and want to put it to action anywhere in your business. While you can use a general purpose tool for feature voting, it can be a pain because these tools aren't tailor-made for shaping a product roadmap.

Productific, a leightweight SaaS tool for roadmap voting, gives you additional benefit:

  • Users engage in a dedicated tool, no chunky spreadsheets or task boards.
  • Users can contribute new ideas directly via "request new feature", without having to use generic "create task" or "new entry" buttons.
  • Feature requests are mapped to new or existing features in your backlog, you can also ignore requests when they are outside your targets.
  • Users can view and vote on existing ideas
  • Users can forward, share and comment ideas - built in.
  • Users do not need to go through your support team to influence the product roadmap.
  • Users can see which improvements are being worked on and stay engaged
  • Ideas are automatically ranked to show the most attractive ones on top

That's all you need to identify the most attractive new features for your mobile app - and increase your app's popularity.

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