Key behind retaining users in modern Web Applications
Sound is one of the most basic components of a web application, yet it is often forgotten or left without any adjustments and modifications. Without any sound, a highly interactive application can see itself failing to retain its users or even attract them in the first place. We live in an era where there are billions of websites and web applications just a click away, yet only a handful of them are household names, most of which have been around for a fairly long time.
Having an idea and turning that idea into reality just doesn’t cut it anymore. Making the application user-friendly does prevent users from feeling frustrated but there are so much more elements needed to retain these users, and better yet, use these retainment methods to attract even more users through word of mouth. There is simply a need to combine marketing and engineering strategies in the designing process of a web application.
Magazines usually grab attention through the use of bold unique fonts and well-thought-out pictures of celebrities on the front cover while automobile companies market their product by making you feel the urge and desire to be behind the wheels of their state-of-the-art vehicle. Adopting strategies to grab attention and making the user the center of attention in your application design process can significantly reduce the need to delegate a huge sum of money and time into figuring out ways to hype it up, more than what it really is. What matters, in the end, isn’t how many new users you’ve managed to attract but rather how many users you managed to retain.
There are many different ways you could retain users. In this post, I’ll be focusing on using sound to offer the users a unique experience, which ultimately is the key behind the retainment.
Sure, sound can sometimes be dull, boring, and repetitive. This can also be the case with seeing the same post on your Facebook newsfeed being shared countless times by the people and pages you follow. But it doesn’t always have to be that way. With the introduction of Web Audio API back in 2011, web browsers were given the ability to be used as a tool for artistic expression. Tools powerful enough that allows dynamic processing of audio sources, preventing the need for high-end rendering tools like Vegas Pro or Adobe Premiere for rendering static files.
Unlike most libraries, getting started with Web Audio API can be quite intimidating, especially if you’re a programmer with no familiarity with music terms. This can quickly be overcome with the various tutorials and guides offered by Mozilla. Without getting too technical, the main takeaway is that you can treat an individual element of an audio context as a node of its own — a node for each audio file/stream — and transform those nodes with custom effects to relay your own artistic story.
By giving users such a unique experience, it creates excitement and the urge to share that emotion with those around them. Inadvertently, this is marketing being done without spending fortunes on campaigns, and word of mouth is the best marketing anyone could ever get. Whether it’s for an online business, personal portfolio, or just a side project, sound is one of those components that, with the use of Web Audio API, can give a whole new set of characteristics to your web application.
