The Challenge
The Android app developer community is a cohort that can solve problems for the masses. Depending on the profile, nationality, ethnicity, interests and personal experiences, developers create relevant solutions for their local circles. However, despite having great ideas and skills to develop app-based solutions it was recognised that developers struggled with sustaining those solutions.
These product-level solutions would often begin to lose momentum as their maintenance and operations costs began to weigh down the developer. The developer would need to strategize and monetise their app. However, evaluating and improving user engagement on apps can be a challenging task for anyone who is not trained for the job. Failing to step up to the need of the hour would result in shutting the app down, meaning the developers would be unable to help their communities.
Recognising this challenge, an e-learning platform set out to assist developers in strategizing and monetising their apps to ensure that their solutions were sustained on the Play Store. Despite highlighting the best practices to follow on the Play Store, the e-learning platform experienced high user attrition rates.
The aim of the project was to understand the factors affecting this user behaviour. Was the content irrelevant? Hard to find? Too basic? Too advanced? Too broad, vague, introductory, theoretical, etc? What could the e-learning platform do to improve learner engagement on the platform?
The Outcome
The research design helped us discover the online learning behaviour of these developers. With these, we could arrange learning behaviour archetypes of these developers, based on their profiles, motivations, career/business goals and pain points and gain points, recommendations for the platform were made.
The recommendations included the unique value proposition for each archetype, the communication style and strategy and a roadmap to create a minimum lovable e-learning platform for the archetypes. While all archetypes were meticulously detailed, larger recommendations and strategies to improve attrition rates were also made.
The Approach
Before the study we knew that learning behaviour is largely informed by a developer's profile, experience level, interest area, current challenges etc, it was crucial for entrepreneurs to have a mix of beginners, experts, students, entrepreneurs and team leaders at large organisations.
In-depth interviews with developers from all these backgrounds elicited their 'day-in-a-life', their aspirations and current challenges to achieve their goals etc. A longitudinal assessment of their learning experience on the platform was done, based on the roadblocks of their app development process, learners were recommended to take up a few courses on the platform and provide feedback and reactions to the experience.
These reactions and feedback on the content informed us to recommend a strategic roadmap to platform development (what features to include, when to include them, how to design them and for whom), segmented marketing channels and the type of messaging the platform needs to convey to its target group.