Your app has about 30 seconds to show it’s highly usable; and your content has about 3 seconds to grasp the average user. Only a minority of persistent users would be trying it out further. Just as market conditions change (for example, one-time payments for apps are widely replaced by the freemium model), our behavior and expectations as mobile users change as well.

We become more and more demanding, if not capricious. The apps we use must be perfect, otherwise we can always leave elsewhere and find a better app. We don’t tolerate dragging load time. This perfection and your eventual business goals, cannot be reached without high usability of the product.

Usability directly affects the success of every app. Here are its common components:

• Effectiveness, or accuracy and completeness at achieving certain goals in a specified context of use;

• Efficiency, or the degree of expending users’ resources in relation to the achieved effectiveness;

• Physical, cognitive, and emotional satisfaction received by users during interaction with the app.

The shortest advice on usability from a good UX/UI designer might be: ”Follow the guidelines and value feedback.” If go a little further, we’d like to point out several major indicators that will help measure the usability of your app before and after the release.

Time Spent By Users In The App

The more, the better may apply here, but all else depends on the app’s functional purposes. Some apps usually take less than a minute at a time (currency converter), some apps take several minutes (image editor, ‘time-killing’ game), while passionate gamers can be occupied with games of favorite genres or, say, kids with educational apps for a longer period of time.

Number Of Uninstalls Over A Time Period

People may uninstall your apps for many reasons. But the most obvious is that they found it inconvenient in some way, and it has a lot to do with poor usability. Tracking downloads is essential; but it’s uninstalls that point more precisely at something wrong with user experience.

Conversion Rates

Well-built, consistent usability is a warrant for getting good conversion rates. It’s the way of directing and persuading your users to perform the required actions. The task of your UX/UI designer is to suggest eye-catching calls to action and place them correctly within the context of usage.

Those Precious Negative Reviews

They usually start coming with beta testing – the usual way of starting to gather reviews as for usability of your software. Negative reviews help you see which functions require improvements as for usability – there’s hardly anything to add here.

As for tools to help you track all of these stats, there are lots of options, including Flurry Analytics, Google Analytics, Appsee, AppsFlyer, Lookback, Localytics, Distimo, and others. They offer a wide range of metrics to consider. The aforementioned beta testing also counts as a major tool. But your best tool for getting guideline-precise usability from the beginning is your software development partner, and your own willingness to listen to suggestions and contribute to the process of creation.

See whether your users are satisfied with the app; see whether it’s easy for them to use it; see whether they’ve developed a need for it; see whether they’d recommend it to friends. Provide these people with special questionnaires to answer everything you need to know.

There is no device to tell you the usability level of your interface; but you can track certain factors that affect it. Your contractor’s usability experts can uncover and eliminate the major issues – identify usability problems, look for solutions, discuss them with, and test the outcome, so that you have a high-quality app to start with.