Category: Tips

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10 Tips to help you build strong coding skills

strong coding skills
Coding tips

Best practices for learning how to code

So, you’ve finished your first introductory coding course, but you don’t know what to do next. We’ve created this article to give you tips on what you should do, and what you shouldn’t do when you’re taking your first steps as a developer and trying to build strong coding skills.
Although this was originally designed for applicants preparing for the Code Chrysalis Immersive technical interview, it has useful information for anyone looking to take their next steps as a new developer!
Let’s get right into it. Here’s some advice to help you take your skills to the next level.

Tip 1: Be careful about coding challenge websites

Ignore the top scorers…for now. Oftentimes, the code solutions that get the top scores on websites like CodeWars and Coderbyte are not examples of good code. This is because the websites are games, and part of the game for developers is to see how short they can get their solutions.
While these solutions work, they are not necessarily what would be recommended in a professional setting. Why? That leads us to our next piece of advice.

Tip 2: Write code for people

We write code for people, and it is run by computers. Not the other way around. Short code does not always mean clear code.
If you take the code from coding challenge sites, you run the risk of interacting without fully understanding the code in question. If you’re new to coding, these often involve techniques or concepts that are a few levels above what you should be focusing on.
Comprehension is key.

Tip 3: Passing tests are useless if you do not know why

It can be easy to throw a bunch of ideas against a wall and see what sticks. But it would be even better if you knew why it sticks. For beginners and experienced devs alike, it is key to also understand the why’s.
If you do not understand “why” for basic topics, how will you understand “why” for advanced topics?

Tip 4: Be careful of copy-pasting code from StackOverflow or blogs

Make sure you know why something works (or does not work). Invest the time to understand the fundamentals. Another problem with StackOverflow – or blogs – is that they can be wrong, whether intentional or not. They can also be outdated.

Stay vigilant about the material or answers you are looking at.

Tip 5: Familiarize yourself with reading documentation

Reading documentation (on-line manuals) is an important skill. Frankly, it is a skill that many working developers lack, so building up this skill early will set you apart.
You can find JavaScript documentation on the Mozilla Developer Network. It can be intimidating to read and you will not be able to understand everything you read for quite a while. But that’s ok.

If you can learn just one new thing every time you try to read the documentation, you are making solid progress.

Tip 6: Learn to do things without native methods first

If you are using .forEach and .map for everything, I suggest you try solving problems without using any of those.
We want to be able to understand how these built-in methods work before using them. If you do not know how to do things without them, you will always be coding half-blind.

Make sure you have 20/20 vision. Your career will thank you for it.

Tip 7: Check your assumptions by running and checking your code often

Do not be afraid to use console.log to print things out.
Always double check.
Be aware of what data you have access to at any given point in your code.

Make sure that you test your assumptions — are you sure that variable is a function? A string? A number?

Sometimes, what you think is a 2 is instead a ‘2’ and that can make a big difference in code. Use  console.log and also typeof to double-check that what you think is true.

This will also protect you from bugs. It can be frustrating to write a bunch of code, only to run it at the end and realize that there is something wrong. Protect yourself from making these mistakes before you reach the end.

Tip 8: Error messages are your friends

When you see an error message appear, this is actually something to welcome.

Familiarize yourself with common error messages and what they mean — do not ignore them. Learn to read them so you can use them to your advantage.

Error messages will also give you a line number in your code where the error originated from. If it isn’t immediately clear what the error message means, Google it!

As you get more advanced, you will come across silent errors. The evil twin of error messages. These are situations where something is not working, but you do not have a handy error message telling you where it is going wrong. They are the worst.

So, next time you see an error message pop up, give them a big hug and thank you. And then listen to them.

We’ve listed some common error messages for beginner coders below:

Uncaught ReferenceError: ______is not defined>

This usually happens because a variable or function name is missing; the JavaScript engine is not sure what you are referring to.

Are you sure you spelled everything correctly? Are all of your variables declared? Did you copy/paste code? (Please don’t copy-paste code without understanding it)

Uncaught SyntaxError: Function statements require a function name
Uncaught SyntaxError: Unexpected identifier.

Did you forget a closing or opening bracket or parenthesis? That is usually the case.

Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property>

This often happens when you are trying to read a property or call a method on an undefined object. Are you using a method that does not exist on an object? Is your object defined?

For more information, check out this helpful article.

Tip 9: Go slow and review often

It feels a little counter-intuitive, right?

Review concepts that you think you are already familiar with often. You will probably always come across something new. Try seeing if you can understand more MDN documentation each time.

You are learning the fundamental building blocks that will support your career. Spend time making sure this foundation is as strong as possible. Do not be ashamed of going back to review strings and numbers, even if you think you already know how to use them. There is always more to learn before you build strong coding skills.

So while React can seem really attractive, if you do not have a good grasp of the basics, it will be a struggle and waste of effort.

Tip 10: Make it work, then make it pretty

Do not stress about making your code look elegant. First, get it working. Then, we can go back and clean it up.

Working and ugly is better than broken and…still broken!

About the author:

Yan-Headshot

===

Yan Fan is Code Chrysalis’ CTO and Co-Founder. Born in China and raised in Seattle, she graduated from Dartmouth College with degrees in Economics and Arabic. After graduation, Yan worked at Bunge Global Agribusiness, a commodities trading house. After a career change into tech, Yan worked as a software engineer at Ayasdi, a leading Silicon Valley machine learning startup, and as an instructor for Hack Reactor’s prep course.

Code Chrysalis is Yan’s second coding bootcamp–with Hack Reactor, she co-founded and served as CTO of a coding school in Jordan helping refugees in 2016.

 

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Business Community Tips

Job positions for Video Game designers

game designer

 

game design job positions

So, you know how to get into game designing, and you know that education and training standards you need to succeed – now all you need to do is get ahead of everyone else and begin to make headway as a game designer.

Once you have achieved the level of education or training needed for a career in game design, you can plan for your future in the industry. This begins with determining your career path, gaining experience, and creating your first game.

Determine a Career Path

Even within the specialty, there are many different types of game designers. Furthermore, game designers have diverse roles within their various positions which may not be obvious. This is why it is important for aspiring game design professionals to fully consider the type of game career they intend to pursue.

Senior Level Designer

This position is responsible for outlining the level objectives and game flow within a set and then is required to create the documentation for each level. A senior level designer should be able to create, position, and fine-tune game play elements and AI components.

Level Designer

This is a position subordinate to a senior level designer. Level designers will typically use the provided design documentation, including all mechanics, any guidelines, and the mission outlines to create and implement each of the game’s levels.

Lead Animator

Animators work in close collaboration with artists, programmers, and designers to create each aspect of the characters used in the game.

Gain Experience

Getting an entry level job with a large game studio can be a difficult proposition. Since most employers require some game design experience for most jobs, new game designers have to find creative ways to gain relevant experience.

Game Designer Internships

Some companies offer internships or co-op positions for beginner designers.

Go Small and Indie

Small businesses on a budget are often willing to hire game programmers or artists with little practical experience.

Coding for a Cause

There are some charities that require coding and game design. You can sign up and start writing code while gaining real-world experience.

Develop a Game

Game designers can create a buzz, get experience, and gain a competitive edge when they design and publish their own game. Utilise free programs to create a simple, engaging and interactive mobile game. Publish it for sale on the app marketplace. Then begin working on something more complex. Each game will add value to your portfolio and most importantly, it will count as design experience.

Game design is an exciting and fast-growing field. However, it is one of the most difficult to break into. To do so you need a clear direction and understanding of the industry, education and training requirements, and a strategy to succeed.

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Business Tips

How can developers improve their paycheck.

developer pay check

As a software developer, what is the most lucrative opportunity you could be working on? This is a very relevant question to ask. Software skills are generally scarce and good developers are highly coveted. Furthermore, developers are mobile, in the sense that the nature of their trade allows them to work from remote locations quite easily and marketplaces for their services are well established. So which project should you pick to improve your paycheck?

developer salary

There are many reasons why someone might prefer one job over another, but let’s be honest: developers deserve to get paid well, given their important position in the global value chain. For the first time in 12 editions, we asked developers in our survey how much they earn in salaries or contractor fees. The results are in and from the data we learn several insights that can help developers improve their paycheck, and conversely, provide opportunities for organisations to find talent.

First, there are enormous differences in how much developers in each region and software sector earn. The best earning developers in our survey – those in the top ten percent – often earn tens and sometimes hundreds of times as much as the least well-off, i.e. the bottom decile. Part of this gap is location-driven. We’ll come back to that shortly. This said, we can only conclude that a developer’s skill, knowledge, and reputation do matter. Investing in them will pay off.

Developers working in areas with a higher technical complexity generally earn more.

Talking of skills, developers who work in areas with a higher technical complexity – and therefore higher barriers to entry and ultimately fewer developers doing it – generally earn more. Developers that work on cloud computing and other backend services report higher salaries than those working on front-end web apps. Machine learning specialists make even more than the backend folks. In Western Europe, for example, the median web developer has a yearly gross salary of $35,400 USD, the median backend developer earns $39,500 and a machine learning developer makes $45,200. This relationship is seen across regions and also at higher wage levels. Web and mobile development are the most commoditised; there is a fairly low barrier to start making simple apps or websites, and these tasks are relatively easily outsourced to other regions.

Scarcity of skills drives up paycheck amounts for developer services.

Scarcity of skills drives up the price for developer services. This is also true for new, emerging areas of development, like Augmented and Virtual Reality, or the Internet of Things, but only at the top end of the scale.The best developers in emerging areas earn top dollar, while the bottom half of the developer population makes less than their counterparts in more established sectors. Let’s compare Augmented Reality (AR) with backend developers in North America as an example. The median wage for an AR developer in that region is $71,000 USD, a good bit less than the $79,200 that the median backend developer makes. At the top end, however, AR development is more lucrative. At the 75th percentile, the AR developer is paid $132,300 and the backend developer $122,800. At the very top (90th percentile), the difference is even more pronounced: $219,000 for AR, $169,000 for backend. The reason for this wide range of salaries is that markets like AR/VR or IoT are still commercially underdeveloped. Companies that are early adopters pay large sums for skilled developers, who are scarce. At the same time, less experienced developers are attracted by the hype. Their compensation suffers both from a lack of relevant skill and from a lack of companies that are hiring in the early market.

Again this pattern repeats across regions. The exception is South Asia. The outsourcing model that drives software development in that region seems to be built on maintaining legacy code and developers there are less involved in emerging innovations (a conclusion that’s also supported by our developer population sizing research).

Developer-wages

We’re still a long way off a global market for developers!

We started this chapter by saying that developers can market their services location-independently if they choose to. However, it’s clear from the data that we’re still a long way off a global market for developers! The median web developer in North America for instance earns $73,600 USD per year. A Western European web developer earns half of that – $35,400 USD – although recent exchange rate shenanigans due to Brexit and the Euro-crisis will have affected that comparison. Web developers in other regions earn again half of that: between $11,700 in South Asia and $20,800 in Eastern Europe. Not just the region of the world you live in matters, but also the country and even the city you call home.

This opens up opportunities for organisations who will accept remote workers. You can hire a top 10% Eastern European backend developer for less money than the median North American wage in that sector. For developers, it means that brushing up your English skills and looking for opportunities beyond your backyard can be very interesting indeed. Developers who take that leap and seek opportunities that pay to international standards are in the minority. This explains why top wages in emerging regions (Asia, the Middle East, Africa) are so exuberantly high compared to local standards. A Western developer in the top decile earns about three times as much as the median wage in his sector and region. In the emerging world, top wages are seven to ten times the median. The best developers in those regions work for multinationals or sell their services on international marketplaces, while most stay employed locally, at much lower remuneration levels.

So what’s a developer to do if you want to move up in the world, financially? Invest in your skills. Do difficult work. Improve your English. Look for opportunities internationally. Go for it. You deserve it!

Take our Developer Economics Survey and speak out about other challenges you face!

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Business Tips

How to become a Video Game designer : Education & Training

video game designer

In the first part of our series we looked at how to plan and get started for a career as a video game designer, taking a look at what a game designer actually does, who typically employs them and the potential for earning good money. In this second part we’re going to look more closely at education and training.

video game designer

If you have spent any time researching a career in game design, then you probably already know that the most current game design training is needed. This industry is growing; however, it remains extremely competitive. Therefore, it is essential to have expert knowledge of the entire game R&D process. If it is your goal to work for a game studio or to design your own games, you need training as a programmer and in graphic design or art.

Degree Programs for Game Design

Many universities offer courses in computer science. However, designers may need a bachelor’s degree if they are planning to work for large game studios. Although some colleges offer a degree in game design, aspiring game designers can get the necessary training from computer science, software engineering, or related degree programs.

Required Coursework

The required coursework for game design programs cover subjects like 2D, 3D and CAD modelling and animation. They also include level and interface design. Other courses needed are in storyboard rendering, drawing, and scripting.

Co-Curricular Activities

Many schools have a club for students who wish to work on game design and development outside of the classroom. If your school or program doesn’t offer a game design club, join their AV club instead.

Coding Bootcamps are a great way to learn a lot in a short period. These are often available free or low-cost through various schools or communities. There are also some free camps available online.

Extra-Curricular Activities of a Video Game Designer

It’s important, also, that you regularly play video games. As simple as that sounds, you need experience as a game player. It helps you become aware of the most modern trends in the industry. Understanding the most current advanced gaming technology can also be beneficial. Pay attention to how games are structured and begin to think of ways you would improve them. Make notes for when you begin to design your own game.

Some employers will require a bachelor’s in video game design or related computer science program, while for others A-levels will be the minimum requirement. To make up for insufficient formal education, you may need to have experience working within the computer science, or graphic arts industry. You will need to possess an understanding of programming languages, software design, and modelling programs.

Next week, we’ll take a close look at how to finally launch your career.

 

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Business Tips

[Infographic] How to design a growth strategy for your app.

app growth strategy

Developers are makers. They solve pains, entertain, enlighten, and enhance productivity. Building an app can be an exhilarating experience and the joys of shipping can linger for… about ten seconds. Then comes the question: “I’ve built an app, now what?” Where do you start with your app growth strategy?

Building strategies for user acquisition and retention are the two major tasks for dev teams after they have built an app. Analytics helps understand exactly what is happening and how to keep building traction. From there, new possibilities can emerge that will help you grow your user community even stronger and help you identify novel ideas that may offer you a winning edge.

Check out our infographic based on our series of articles on User Acquisition , User Retention and Growth Analytics.

Built_an_app_Infographic (3)

Want more insights on app growth strategy?

Check out our State of the Developer Nation Reports, and make sure you understand Analytics for Growth.

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Business Tips

Best Practices for a successful IoT Developer Program

best practices for a successful IoT developer program

Events and training programs are a main component in many IoT developer programs. But just how effective are they?

This infographic sheds some light into the effectiveness of training and events. Insights are based on our Best Practices for IoT Developer Programs report.

Best Practices for an IoT Developer Program
Infographic
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Platforms Tips

4 out of 10 sites unaware of the Google’s new Mobile Ranking Signal

mobile ranking signal

A variety of mobile devices have flooded the Web in the past years. To no one’s surprise, Google announced that starting April 21st, they’ll expand the use of mobile-friendliness as a mobile ranking signal, in fact penalizing all sites that don’t have a mobile strategy – dubbed “Mobilegeddon” in the recent press.

Furthermore, Google just paid $25 million for exclusive rights to the “.app” top-level domain. Although the company hasn’t yet announced any specific plans for .app, this could be the signal that the Mobile Web will evolve beyond Responsive Web Design (RWD) and lean more towards rich UX/UI and mimicking of the native environment.

Presumably, [tweetable]the update to their algorithm will have a significant impact on Google’s mobile search results[/tweetable]. If you’re like me, you’d want to go all the way and find out the specifics: what is the current distribution of mobile web strategies, how many websites will be impacted by this change and to what degree? If you already have a mobile web strategy in place or just started developing one, you’d probably also want to know how to optimize it: how “lengthy” should your pages be or how “heavy”? And what Google’s PageSpeed Insights has to says about it?

We have searched the answers to these questions by analyzing the top 10,000 Alexa sites, from 5 different categories: News, E-commerce, Tech, Business and Sports. What we discovered was no less surprising and we felt like this is something worth sharing with the community. Before diving into the data let me tell you a few words on the methodology.

As per Google’s guidelines, we have taken into consideration three types of configurations for building mobile sites:

google-table

Google recognizes three different configurations for building mobile sites. (Google Developers)

  • Responsive web design: serving the same HTML code on the same URL, regardless of the users’ device; render the display differently based on the screen size.
  • Dynamic serving (also known as adaptive): using the same URL regardless of device, but generating HTML code dynamically by detecting the browser’s User Agent
  • Separate URLs (also known as mobile friendly): serving different code to each device and a separate web address for the mobile version

To detect the strategy used by different websites, we have crawled them using an iPhone User Agent.

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A334 Safari/7534.48.3

On top of that, we also identified those sites that implemented a Smart App Banner meta tag in the head of their home page, to market their iOS app:

<meta name="apple-itunes-app" content="app-id=myAppStoreID">

For analyzing the performance, we have used the PageSpeed Insights API, which takes into consideration not only the size of a webpage, but also compression, server response time, browser caching and landing page redirects, among others.

We also wanted to see how long mobile pages have become. Since RWD relies heavily on scrolling, we asked ourselves if this is an effective way to display content and what can be considered an optimum page height. Throughout the rest of the article, you’ll see references to “X5” height rate, which means that a site’s main page height is 5 times the height of the viewport on iPhone 6 (375 x 667). This is an indication of how much scroll needs to be done in order to reach the last piece of content.

visionmobile-infographics

Overview of Mobile Strategies on the Web

It’s 2015 and if you think that RWD is winning over mobile friendly sites (separate URLs), you’re spot on. Nearly 28% of the sites we’ve researched are responsive, while 26% have opted for a separate mobile address. The gap is indeed there, but it’s not as wide as we might have assumed. The surprising fact is that 40% of the researched sites have no mobile web strategy whatsoever! To me, that’s HUGE! Since Google’s new algorithm update is just around the corner, we can easily imagine that ignoring mobile users will no longer be an option.

Deeply buried in the data, we’ve also found another interesting fact: approximately 4% considered that being adaptive (serving different content under the same web address) is the right strategy for their mobile web presence.

2% of the researched websites have chosen to target their mobile users through applications (iOS). The number may in fact be bigger, but the inconsistency in promoting their apps makes them difficult to track.

Let’s dig a little bit more and see the variations between different categories and the impact that each strategy has on the overall mobile experience.

Newspapers – resistive as always

Being “stuck in the past” seems to be rightly attributed to the publishing industry, especially to newspapers: 38% of the websites from this category are mobile-friendly (separate URLs) and only 25% responsive.

In the PageSpeed Insights (PSI) results, adaptive comes on top with 75% scoring between 40 and 60 (although only 15% are above 60). Interestingly enough, mobile-friendly sites score even better (19% with PSI > 60), while only 11% of responsive sites have a score higher than 60. In fact, most of the sites that score under 20 are responsive (10%).

Wait, what? I thought Google loves responsiveness, right? There are countless articles about how Google recommends RWD as the best way to target mobile users. Surely, something doesn’t add up!

Or maybe most of the responsive sites don’t comply with Google’s own recommendations. A plausible explanation might be that developers have mistaken Google’s love for good mobile experience with the love for responsiveness, thus taking Google’s guidelines for granted. Instead of taking advantage of RWD, they end up producing sites that score poorly on all aspects.

When looking at sites’ height distribution on mobile devices, we see that the average for mobile-friendly ones is X8, which is pretty close to the X7 average rate represented by adaptive sites. However, 54% of adaptive sites have a less than X5 height rate.

In all fairness, “old” doesn’t necessarily mean wrong for newspapers sites and this time it might be working in their favor: 47% of responsive sites have a X10 – X15 height rate and 14% even over X15, which means that mobile users have to do a lot of scrolling before reading a certain piece of content.

So why are mobile friendly pages shorter? Did they notice that not so “lengthy” pages are more suitable for reading content on mobile? Is that the reason behind choosing mobile friendly (separate URLs) over responsiveness? But if that’s the case, why not going all the way towards adaptive? They’re doing a better job in terms of producing closer to optimum mobile pages (averaged at 2.5MB for both mobile-friendly and adaptive, compared to 3.7 MB for responsive) so perhaps it’s the ease of managing a separate mobile site all together.

Looking at Alexa’s popularity ranks, we notice that as the rank decreases, the number of responsive websites grows. The majority of sites with a low popularity rank are in fact responsive (14%), while 53% of the analyzed adaptive sites place themselves among the top ranked ones.

Tech sites – leaning towards RWD

In contrast with the above findings, responsive sites predominate in the “Tech” category (33%), while only 12% are mobile friendly (separate URLs).

In addition to that, 58% have page sizes under 2MB and consequently – a higher score on PageSpeed Insights: 51% mark over 60 and only 1.5% under 20. A page size of 2MB might sound a bit too much, but in fact, caching and other factors are influencing the overall PSI score.

When comparing the results to the newspapers category, tech websites show a major improvement. Yes, responsive sites still have the biggest height ratio (X6), but the average is significantly lower than what we’ve found earlier (X8).

Unfortunately, the “Tech” category also has the biggest percentage of sites that have NO mobile strategy whatsoever: 51%. It would seem that we have either modern responsive sites or nothing at all.

Overall, adaptive sites are still the most efficient in terms of score, but responsive sites are stealing the 1st place when it comes to height ratio, with a slightly bigger percentage of websites having a height rate of X5.

E-commerce sites fare better than most

For the “Shopping” category, mobile-friendly (separate URLs) and responsive sites are at a tie: 26%. Surprisingly though, adaptive e-commerce sites scored the biggest percentage of all categories: 6%. What would cause e-commerce sites to lean towards adaptive?

One plausible reason can be their appetite for improving conversion rates, thus their attention to optimize everything related to the buying funnel, which is influencing their mobile strategy as well.

If we analyze the height distribution for all three configurations (separate mobile URLs, responsive and adaptive), we see a pattern emerging: e-commerce sites, regardless of their mobile strategy, have the biggest percentages for under an X5 height rate: 90%, 58% and respectively 81%.

One could speculate that the reason for keeping their pages shorter is related to the influence that a lower height ratio might have on conversion rates. On top of that, PageSpeed Insights offers the highest score for all three mobile strategies: ~90% of mobile friendly/adaptive sites and 75% of the responsive ones have scored at least 40 points.

[tweetable]Clearly, e-commerce sites are doing a great job at optimizing for mobile[/tweetable] and, regardless of their favorite strategy (adaptive sites seem to be leading by a low margin), they’re mastering it like no other.

Apps – still luxurious game to play

Among other categories, we’ve found that mobile applications are appealing too: close to 6% of sites from “Business” and “Sports” have created their own iOS application, even if most of these previously opted for mobile friendly sites: 9% respectively 15%.

As a general rule, regardless of the category, if a site doesn’t have a mobile web strategy, chances are it won’t go for an application either. You’d expect it to be the other way around, but if a site owner ignored all previous mobile web strategies at his disposal, would he really be open to a more laborious and expensive approach (apps)? Not really.

Optimum Height and Page Size on Mobile

Analyzing ~10,000 sites in various categories surfaced a couple of guidelines that you might want to take into consideration when implement your mobile web strategy. In essence, what’s the maximum height and page size that your mobile friendly, responsive or adaptive site should have to ensure a 50+ PageSpeed Score?

If we analyze page sizes less than 2M, we realize that mobile-friendly sites, particularly in the Sports category, come on top with little over 91%. We also notice that only 30% of responsive sites score over 50 on PageSpeed Insights. Again, just keeping the page size at this level isn’t enough to ensure a high PSI score since caching can be equally important, but it’s a good place to start.

Interestingly enough, the “News” category is the only one where the majority (52%) of the adaptive sites with scores over 50 has page sizes between 2MB – 4MB. Even if adaptive sites seem to be able to “carry” more weight, their height rate should be kept at the minimum (X5) to ensure a good score.

Applying the same logic to height rates, clearly X5 seem to be the optimum rate for scoring 50+ on PageSpeed Insights. Once more, responsive sites seem to have the least chances of scoring over 50, even if they aim for a lower height: 62%.

Is the Mobile Web Heading Towards “Appification”?

[tweetable]Today, mobile web consumption occurs mostly from in-app browsers[/tweetable]. Just look for example at the Facebook app, that used to open links by using an external browser. Now, they have embedded a browser directly in the app and it makes sense – they don’t want their users to have a broken experience.

With that in mind, shouldn’t mobile websites offer a more app-like experience? Isn’t the linear scrolling experience we see on responsive sites a bit outdated?

In all fairness, what we’ve concluded thus far doesn’t take into account various UI/UX aspects and doesn’t answer some critical questions: When scrolling becomes too much for a mobile site? What’s the impact of having a long scroll and is this the reason for poor mobile reading experience on the web? What else can we do to ensure that mobile users have a good experience on the web?

That’s why in the second phase of the study we’ll analyze how much scrolling is actually being done on a responsive page, on mobile devices. After gathering relevant information on how mobile users interact with responsive sites we’ll be able to complete the next phase of the study by answering some key questions:

  • What’s the mobile device and browser they’re using for accessing a site?
  • How much time they spend on a particular page?
  • What’s the maximum scroll height they reached on a site?

From “Nice To Have” To Mandatory

We’ve seen that 40% of the top 10,000 Alexa sites from 5 categories (News, Tech, E-commerce, Business, Sports) don’t do anything when it comes to their mobile users. However, we’re in the middle of a big shift: [tweetable]having a mobile strategy on the web is no longer just “nice to have”[/tweetable]. If we take into consideration the impending change of Google’s mobile ranking algorithm, we can conclude that at this point any mobile web strategy is a good strategy.

As far as this first part of our study is concerned, from a technical point of view, a page that fits within 2MB and has a height rate of X5 has a good chance to score 50+ on Google’s PageSpeed Insights. Although adaptive websites are overall the most efficient ones regarding these aspects, they are not very popular either. Even though the study clearly shows that RWD is far from being optimum, responsiveness is the leading strategy adopted when targeting mobile users.

If we add to the mix the “.app” top-level web domain bought by Google, the line between native apps and web apps is getting thinner and thinner. The Mobile Web is already evolving beyond responsiveness into something new and exciting where everything is an app instead of a site, where user interactions are more important than just page views and ultimately where all apps are interlinked into a Web of apps.

If you are interested in learning more about mobile app development read the third post of our series on Mobile App Marketing, on Business Models.

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Business Tips

Vital Metrics For Tracking Your App’s Success

app success

Making data driven decisions is key to driving growth in your mobile app, and it’s the reason that nearly every app developer in the world integrates analytics tracking within their app. In fact, in a recent Tapdaq survey we discovered that 90% of developers have implemented a third party analytics SDK into their app[bctt tweet=”90% of developers have implemented a third party analytics SDK into their app” username=”DevEconomics”].

viral-metrics-app-success

However, we were surprised to then learn that only 5% of these developers knew what to do with the data points which they were tracking. After speaking with a large group of the developers questioned, we realised that many aren’t sure which metrics are most important, or what steps they need to take in order to improve.

As the App Store has matured, creating a chart-topping product has become a much more complex process. App analytics providers have moved with the times and now provide developers with more data than ever before on their app’s performance. In this post I am going to pick out 12 app metrics and explain why they are the most important data points when tracking your app’s success.

Acquisition

Growth of your app business starts at the user acquisition stage. Here there are several key questions which all developers ask themselves.

How many installs have I generated?

Tracking installs received as an overall figure is very easy, and all data is provided through iTunes Connect/Google Play.

How much have these downloads cost?

You have to know what your cost per install (CPI) is when paying to acquire new users to your app. [tweetable]If your CPI rises above the value of your user’s lifetime value (LTV), then the campaign is unprofitable[/tweetable] and unless you are propped up by strong organic install numbers, your business is going to struggle.

Working out your cost per install on mobile ad networks is straightforward, and nearly all networks now give this figure to you up front. If you are acquiring users via cost per install ad networks then I’d recommend you test multiple platforms, providing you have a large enough budget. In an interview with KISS Metrics, Wooga’s head of marketing, Eric Seufert, said the company used 23 ad networks to get their Jelly Splash game in to the top charts of the key markets.

Where did these downloads come from?

When you see a spike in your app’s downloads, the first thing you want to know is where they came from. By using install attribution tools you can see a breakdown of all your installs by referral source, which gives you far stronger idea of which networks can send you the greatest volume of users for the lowest cost.

How high a quality are the users within my app?

This question can’t be answered immediately, but, over time, [tweetable]cohort analysis can help you to get a better understanding of the quality of the users [/tweetable]within your app. Specifically, when working with multiple paid traffic sources, you can work out which platform provides you with the most real value beyond just the install itself.

For example, Ad Network A might have sent you 10,000 installs for $20,000, whereas Ad Network B sent 10,000 installs for $15,000. If looking at the CPI alone, logic would say that Ad Network B is the preferred choice here. However, using cohort analysis you may discover the users from Ad Network A have an LTV of $2.50, whereas the users from Ad Network B only have an LTV of $1.50. So, in terms of real value, Ad Network A would actually be the optimal solution.

Engagement

In mobile analytics, the fun really starts after the install. With app engagement there are multiple metrics that need to be tracked in order to paint a picture of how engaged your users really are.

Session Length

Tracking your session length is not as straight forward as it sounds. Different analytics companies have different definitions when it comes to sessions. For example, Flurry deem a session to start when an application is opened, and end when the app is terminated. By default, a session is ped as terminated if a user leaves the app for more than 10 seconds, although this logic can be changed.

In contrast, Google Analytics only consider a session to be over after 30 seconds of inactivity, although again this can be customised to any required time.

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They key takeaway here is to ensure you know exactly how a session is defined within your app, as the definition does vary depending on who your analytics provider is.

Time in App

This is a marketing metric that is sometimes confused with session length, and is also often classed as a retention metric.

Where session length describes how long a user’s individual session lasts, time in app is used to define how long a user spends within an app, in total, over a given length of time. For example, a user could spend 2 hours in an app over the course of a week, and this could comprise of multiple sessions. The more time a user spends in your app on a daily basis, the better your chances are of monetising that user.

Popular Pages/Features

Understanding which pages and events are most popular in your app helps you paint a better picture of which content is most valuable to your users. More importantly, it also highlights weaknesses too. By tracking your page visits and conversion funnels you are able to see exactly where users drop out from your app, and this enables you to make data driven decisions on what content to improve in order to get more users reaching the ‘aha’ moment in your product.

Retention

It is argued that user retention is what sets apart a top grossing app from its competitors. Whilst user engagement tracks how long users spend within your app, user retention focusses on how often customers visit your app. It’s worth bearing in mind that a digital product can be a huge success, even if engagement is low, providing retention rates are high. For example, Google is a very successful tech company with sky high retention rates, yet engagement is relatively low.

Let’s take a look at the most important engagement rates you need to be tracking…

Retention Rate

User retention rate can be calculated in a number of ways. However, probably the most popular method is rolling retention (which is actually the default method used by Flurry Analytics).

To calculate this, you need to look at the proportion of users returning to your app on Day+N, or any day after that, and dividing it by the number of users who had installed your app on Day 0.

Here’s a great graphic from the Applift blog that summarises this calculation…

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It’s going to be very interesting to see exactly how powerful Apple make their analytics tracking within iTunes Connect. A sneak preview has been posted on the AppTweak blog, showing a screenshot of a cohort table used for tracking retention…

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Daily and Monthly Active Users

[tweetable]Your daily and monthly active user count is another measure of just how ‘sticky’ your app is[/tweetable]. Over time, successful apps look to grow the gap between their daily downloads and their daily active users, and they do this by ensuring they add as much value to their customers as often as possible.

Again, both these metrics are heavily tied with engagement. The more engaging the content is within your app, the more likely it is you will retain your users. The more often you can provide them with value, the higher your DAU count will be.

Churn rate

User churn rate is a key metric to understand, particularly when you come to calculating your user lifetime value (LTV). Churn rate is the opposite to retention rate and is the measure of how many users stop using your app over a given period of time, usually a month.

Churn rate is expressed as a percentage of the number of people who could have left and it is not possible for customer churn to be 0% or lower. An example would be: If your app has 100 users, then 100 people could leave/stop using your app this month. At the end of the month, only 23 users stop using your app, so this means you have a churn rate of 23%.

Monetisation

Average Revenue Per User (ARPU)

This metric is often confused with LTV, but it’s actually a far simpler data point to track. ARPU is the revenue you generate, on average, from each user of your application, and this can be calculated by simply adding up the revenue your app generates each month, and dividing it by your total number of users.

LTV

Lifetime Value, often shortened to LTV, is the measure of the revenue a customer will bring during their lifetime of using your application. In our recent Tapdaq survey, amazingly all 60 of the developers we spoke to said it was the most valuable metric in app marketing.

To calculate the LTV of one of your users there are several data points you need to know. They are:

  • Customer Churn: As described above…
  • Income: This includes all revenue from In-App Purchases and subscriptions, after Apple has taken their 30% cut, and any income from selling advertising space within your applications.
  • Number of active users: This one’s fairly obvious, it’s the number of active users your application has. The definition of what a “user” or “active user” is will vary depending on your application and your business model. If you have a mix of active users where some generate income and some don’t, include them all. This mix will likely continue as your app grows.
  • Average Revenue Per User (ARPU): As described above…

Once you have collated all the numbers above, just plug them into the equation below to discover the average LTV of your users.

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App Success Sum Up

There are quite a number of important metrics that you need to be tracking and improving upon in order to make your app a true success. Always be looking at the wider picture, and evaluating how each metric has an effect on one another. If your team is small, or you are an indie developer working alone, then I’d recommend starting by iterating your product with the focus on increasing engagement, retention, and your average user LTV. You don’t need to have millions of users on board in order to build a truly great mobile app. Test heavily, and make data driven decisions in order to position yourself in a place where you can start to invest in acquisition with the confidence in your product’s quality and monetisation.

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Business Tips

How to beat 2/3rds of app competitors

Our mission here at Developer Economics is to help developers create a better app business. A recent survey from App Promo highlights the pain points once again, and offers some hints about the solution.

Let’s start with the bad news…

4 out of 5 developers admit that their app doesn’t make enough money to be considered a standalone business. 2 out of 3 doesn’t break even. This confirms our results from the Developer Economics 2013 report, where 67% of developers who want to earn money live under the App Poverty line (revenues of less than $500 per month).

Despite these disconcerting numbers, and despite developers indicating discovery, making money and turning the app into a business as the main challenges, most developers undervalue the importance of marketing their applications. According to the App Promo survey, 2 out of 3 developers don’t have a marketing budget, and a quarter of developers doesn’t market their app at all.

And yet there is hope. A full 81% of developers said that they would not abandon their app. App Promo found that the survivors (experienced developers with apps that are over 3 years in the market) have succeeded in creating an interesting app business. They report revenues earned to date of over half a million, 100% of them breaks even and 78% considers their app successful enough for a standalone business. And yes, they do market their apps: over half of the respondents in this group has marketing budgets of over $1000 per month.

App Promo’s results also include differences between platforms, the use of various revenue models and marketing techniques, and more. The full results can be downloaded here.

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Business Tips

Why You Should Localize from Day 1 (And How to Do it Painlessly)

Continuous Localization

Localization is rarely discussed (and often overlooked by developers), but it is increasingly important in today’s economy where mobile development is a global industry. The United States ranks fourth, behind South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan in the number of mobile device users per capita. Singapore, Israel and a quartet of European countries round out the top 10.

Localization is certainly worth the effort. A 2007 paper by the Localization Industry Standards Association (LISA), for instance, reported that $25 dollars was returned for every $1 invested in localization. And a 2012 publication from Distimo revealed that on average, applications increased their download volumes on the iPhone by greater than 128% the week after introducing the app in the user’s native language.

But localization can also be a huge undertaking.

Localization can be expensive and cumbersome

But it doesn’t have to be.

Currently, there are three approaches to translation: manual, automated, and hybrid. Each has its own benefits and drawbacks:

Manual – Employees, contractors, volunteers, or language vendors serve as translators. Emails, FTP servers, and spreadsheets are the primary tools for workflow management.

  • Benefits: Accurate, aware of brand identity, and sensitive to context, tone and style.
  • Drawbacks: Expensive, cumbersome and slow
  • Examples: Applingua, LocTeam, WordCrafts

Automated – Computer software is used to translate text from one language to another. Also known as “Machine Translation.”

  • Benefits: Fast, efficient, and low cost
  • Drawbacks: Imprecise, lacks keyword recognition, and insensitive to style
  • Examples: Google Translate, Bing Translator, SYSTRAN, SDL Language Weaver

Hybrid – Human translators are paired with a localization platform that helps automate the localization workflow for developers, product/localization managers, and translators. It brings the benefits of the manual and automated approaches and the drawbacks of neither.

  • Benefits: Efficient, accurate, and sensitive to context, style and tone.
  • Drawbacks: Initial learning curve upon startup
  • Examples: Transifex with Gengo, OneSky

After a few years of trying to build super-computers that understand human language like only a human can, the localization industry is now leaning toward the hybrid approach that still brings a great deal of processor power to bear. The difference though, is in the personal touch that only someone with skin on can provide. A machine cannot understand context or tone. A machine cannot understand the difference between “manual” meaning “by hand” or “manual” meaning the skateboard trick. It can’t inject energy into a paragraph with an unexpected word choice. Those are things that only humans can do.

When to localize?

Once you select from one of the above solutions, the issue of workflow remains. Decide how your localization will get done, and you will also need to decide when in the development process your app will be translated. Developers traditionally approached localization in one of two ways:

In Development– Some developers opt to add an extra step to the release process after which no strings (also referred to as “segments”) may be added, edited, or deleted. This is sometimes called a string freeze. This gives translators the necessary time to work on and test translations without fear of changes. Following this point, only minor bugs may be addressed – strings cannot be changed.

After the strings are translated, they are returned to the developers for use in the final release. This process is then repeated for the next release of the software. This process slows down the release of the software in all languages quite a bit.

Post-Release – The second approach is to release the software and add translations afterwards. This means some pages will be not translated at all, or for software with a previous release that has been translated in the past, only partially translated. With this approach, companies are unable to do a simultaneous release in multiple languages.

Introducing: Continuous Localization

Using either of these traditional workflows means localization will be performed in large batches, making it incompatible with today’s agile processes. It delays the availability of the software in languages other than the source language. And every delay is a missed opportunity to create new customers and generate more revenue.

A new solution is available that moves at the speed of today’s development teams, without demanding development stoppage. The idea is that as soon as a new piece of content gets generated for your app, it’s made available for translation. As soon as a new piece of content gets translated for your app, it’s made available to your users.

It looks like this:

Continuous Localization

We call it Continuous Localization, and it is really only possible with the use of a Continuous Localization Platform to house and manage the entire localization process in the cloud. These systems, now emerging on the market, harness the power of the cloud and APIs to enable a nuanced human-driven translation at the speed of continuous deployment.