Pomodoro Technique App Audit – Improve The Branding + Onboarding

Here’s the latest app audit I did for one of out Bluecloud members.

 
You can download the app here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pomi-ultimate-pomodoro-time/id1142560077?mt=8
See ya!
Carter
TRANSCRIPT
All right, everybody, I’m gonna do these app audits, as you saw in the Facebook group. Could see this post here, can already see some people starting to comment. A lot of people are commenting, which is great. And I’m gonna try to do this every day for like a week or so because I think that this is really important.
I think this will help a lot of people. So, I’m just gonna start from the top and then I’ll go through the rest of these and see which ones will be most helpful. I’ll do what I can. I have not looked at any of these apps. I’m not gonna dress rehearse this. This is straight what I would do if I was doing it completely first time look, right?
Okay, so I’m just gonna start at the top here. POMI is the ultimate Pomodoro time management app. Terrific. So I’m gonna click on that. It already opened up over here. So, we’ve got the page, right? So the first thing I would say is… So people who know what the Pomodoro technique is…who don’t know what the Pomodoro technique is, it’s like a way to do time management where I believe it’s like 30 minutes on, five minutes off, or it’s like blocks of time into that.
So, this is really good because you already know who the target demographic is. It’s people that are interested in the Pomodoro technique. Now what’s also great about this is that you have a larger subset of people that are interested in productivity, and they might not know the Pomodoro time management techniques. So, those are the two markets that we’re thinking about here.
So, as I’m looking at this, I’m imagining myself as someone who’s thinking about, “Okay, I really wanna know more about productivity.” Right? Like… And what is my real benefit when I’m thinking about productivity? It’s that I wanna get more out of the day. I wanna be more effective. But why do you wanna get more out of the day?
Well, typically, it’s because you feel like you’re not getting enough out of the day, which inevitably causes you to stress, right? Or you’re not growing your business fast enough. Let’s get to the real heart of it.
So when I look at this, I see POMI: the ultimate Pomodoro time management app. But when I really drill and think about like, “Who really wants to be more productive?” it’s probably people that are stressed out, people that wanna have massive growth, people that love efficiency. What feelings do these people have that I can really tap into?
So I think the first thing I would think about, I don’t know how you can bake it into the title or how deliberate you wanna be, but maybe think about something like POMI: the ultimate Pomodoro time management app. The Pomodoro time management app for reducing stress or for creating efficiency, or whatever it may be. But really drill in that benefit, if you can. So that’s the first thing I would do.
The icon, I’m gonna be perfectly honest, I’m not the best icon auditor. I don’t always have the best icon ideas. I do think that I would look…and I’m just gonna type this in “Pomodoro technique.” I’m gonna type this into Google, and then I’m gonna click on images.
I’m just gonna look and see what images come up. Now, maybe, I don’t know if there’s like a…I don’t know if this is some sort of like… So, any color is coming up, right? And this is all red. Now, why is it all red? I don’t know. I don’t know enough about the Pomodoro technique to know that it’s all red. But that’s the second thing, right?
This is all blue which, you know, [inaudible 00:03:45] blue is that this may be more calming or whatever. But if I [inaudible 00:03:49] this in and this is all red, people associate the color red with the Pomodoro technique.
Now, if you click on “All,” this is obviously the main one. Boom! Like, that’s what you want your icon to look like. Obviously you can’t rip them off. But if this is what the… If this is what people know the Pomodoro technique to be, I would definitely maybe do a check mark that looks like that “P” or something and I’d throw that tomato in there or whatever, I don’t know.
But, do you see what I’m saying? There’s a huge disconnect between you’re trying to leverage the brand that they already have or the technique style or whatever, but you’re not leveraging any of the graphics.
Now, this is obviously without knowing anything about if you’ve already done this or if you’ve had any sort of trademark issues. But that’s what I would say. Productivity, obviously, that’s great. More frustrated, not being able to come to task even after doing multiple tests. You don’t need to look further. So just from a… This is getting really nitty gritty.
I would break this paragraph up a little bit. You know, make the first sentence a killer headline, and then break it into a few short sentences. People have a better time reading that more often than not. I think I would also, in the… Instead of explaining Pomodoro, what it is, I would explain your app. I would explain why you’re calling it the ultimate Pomodoro app and be like, “This app does X, that no other app does.” Right?
This app reduces stress unlike any other Pomodoro technique because, blank. So you can blank, or whatever. But that’s what I would… In this first paragraph, talk about this. Don’t talk about this. I think you’ll see a lot more. I think…I wouldn’t necessarily change your business right now but this is a good example of, “This may be hurting you.”
There’s no data to prove this right now. And obviously this is also on desktop. This isn’t on a phone, which is where most of the searches are done. I don’t think you should do anything about this yet. But for anybody out there, this is a good example where if you have a productivity app and you’re really going big on this one, you may wanna think about how do you create a new account where you can move these out or move the productivity in there.
Okay. So, the screenshots capture all your tasks and your task inventory. Write a press release, share on social media, estimate tasks and then the to-do today. Estimate tasks and to-do today, screen and start cracking. Focus on just one task. Monitor, review your… Okay. So, I think it’s really important to remember there’s screenshots and there’s onboarding experiences. To me, this looks like an onboarding experience.
This is showing me how I’m gonna use the app, which is totally great, and I think that that can work in utility. But what I wanna see, is I want you to tell me what happens if I capture all my tasks in the task inventory?
So, I want you to say like, efficiently organize all your to-do things. So all of a sudden I’m like, “Wow, okay, I finally have an easy place to put all my stuff.” Estimate tasks in to-do today and start cracking. Okay, 10x your output with this clear system. Right?
That’s a benefit. This right here is just telling me where I’m gonna do it. I wanna know why I’m doing it. Focus on just one task and monitor your progress on to-do screen.
Maybe something where it’s like a quote from… Go find a Huffington Post article and quote it and say, you know, “Studies show that focusing on one task will allow you to be 400% more effective.” And then you call out and it’s like, “We eliminate distractions with this app.” You see what I’m saying? So like, make it less of an onboarding experience and more of a “Holy cow, this is amazing.” And I’m also gonna go back to this idea of what makes this the ultimate. Why is this different? Why is it POMI and not “I’m not going and checking something else out”?
So, anyway, that’s just on the conversion side. This is just on the iTunes page. And now let’s open up this, Mirroring my iPhone here. Again, guys, I have not downloaded this. So, POMI…it’s interesting. I don’t know what POMI health is. I’m just gonna check that out just so that… It has nothing to do with anything. I’m always interested in that, right?
Pomodoro… POMI is obviously what comes up. I’m just looking and seeing what else comes up. So Pomodoro timer, focus booster, time, watch, best timer, flow, express. So, when I look at this, what I’m thinking and I don’t even need to go to the keyword research, I can probably tell you. The people that are searching for Pomodoro in the App Store, they already know what it is.
They’re just looking for a tool that’s gonna time it. So when you’re thinking about this app, when you’re looking through this app, you don’t need to explain it. You’re not trying to convince people, “Hey, this technique or this new strategy is the way to do it.”
These people already know what they’re looking for, right? Like, they already know they’re looking for a timer or some sort of watch or whatever it may be.
So, I think that’s the other thing is, when you think about the users who are looking for this in the App Store, just from an ASO [SP] standpoint, that’s what they’re looking for. Okay, so cool. So, we put this in and POMI Taste, all right. And again, you know, this all comes back, you get the whole thing, we already looked through all this, reviews. No reviews quite yet.
I wouldn’t really worry about that. So, I’m just gonna click get, install. And it’s gonna download. There you go. Download, and hopefully we get this download. It’s like 31 megabytes. All right, as that’s downloading, let’s just look at this. While this is downloading, let’s do something completely…
Let’s step it back for a minute based on that blog post that I just read about market research. So, Facebook ad insights. I don’t want the API. I just want the insights. Let’s see, ads, advertising. What am I doing here? Facebook. Ads manager. Okay, great. So, let’s kick this open. Let’s go down to audience insights. This is just a test account. Obviously there’s nothing in there. All right, so, we’re just gonna go to everyone on Facebook, and I’m gonna do a lot of this on Friday, as well. I’m gonna show you guys, so, bear with me. I’m just gonna type in “Pomodoro technique.” Let’s see how many people.
All right, so, this is surprising. Holy cow. I didn’t think it would be 50% of women who are interested. I would’ve thought this was like way more men than women. But look at that, it’s more women than men. I had no idea. Now, who knows exactly how specific this is, but this is really interesting. Summit estates. What does that mean? That families are enjoying the good life.
So it’s luxury of families, skyboxes, one of the best education. So you’re looking at kind of like an upper tier group of people. So, you’re looking at, you know, relatively even split [inaudible 00:12:01]. But the people are a little more sophisticated, definitely more educated, which I would imagine you can see down here. They’re typically in a relationship and they’re left brained, right? There’s no surprises here.
Look at this, 117% more people who are interested are in grad school. So you’re catering to a higher end, more sophisticated, more affluent relationship audience. So, the customer avatar might be this couple where they live in this really nice place in the suburbs, they’re both working a corporate job and they’ve got their vision boards out. And they spend their time reading really good books, and they have goals, and they stay disciplined.
They’re analytical, and they read the Economist, and all this good stuff, right? And you could start to drill into this, right? They’re watching Ted talks on the weekend instead of going out and watching the NFL. They really like the Dalai Lama, like Humans of New York. They’re humanitarians. They love science. All these sort of things really start to paint a picture of who these people are.
So, now I’ve got an idea of who this person is, and I always like to give this person a name. Where are they located. Instead of cities, I go to countries. All right, so, Australia, Canada, Peru, Brazil, United Kingdom. So this is really interesting too in terms of what audiences you really wanna potentially go after. Brazil, I mean, you can potentially get a lot of cheap users there. But let’s say they’re Australia, right?
Just because that’s an easy example. So now I’m thinking about, “All right, they’re highly educated, they’re in Australia. They’re left brained, they’re working in IT, they’re trying to figure out how to become more efficient, how to move up, how to create more wealth for themselves.” Very kinda classic middle to upper middle class family, or a family that’s in the middle class and they wanna be upper middle class.
And finally, what sort of activities. This isn’t as important, this is more of the Facebook ad stuff that we’ll talk. But now, all of a sudden you have a very good idea of who these people are, right? At first I might have thought that it’s like a single guy entrepreneur, kinda like, you know, someone who’s in the blue cloud world, who’s doing their own thing and they’re just trying to make money, make money, but in reality it may be someone who’s just really busy, and they’re making a lot of money, and they just wanna get more efficient, right?
It’s more about the busyness in their mind and not the busyness in their actual job, right? And so, that’s something to start to think about.
So now I’m gonna open this up. I’m just gonna do this to make it easier. All right. So now, I’ve got this opened. I’m gonna open it up. All right, so, the first thing, plan, do, review. I will definitely allow push notifications. So the first thing you might wanna think about doing on that push notifications, is create a prompt with your own code so that it says, “Hey, we’re gonna give you notifications so that your timer works more effectively.” Right?
Give them a reason why they wanna allow push notifications. Otherwise, more than 50% of people are gonna say no. Fifty percent of people say no automatically. Right? But in an app like this, where you already know, based on all this research we just said, you already know that they get distracted easily. And they’re downloading this app so that they don’t get distracted. So, you might wanna give them a prompt and say, “Please do not… Here’s why you need notifications. This isn’t to annoy you, it’s to alert you when your timer is up.”
Okay. So, select your preferred language. We’re gonna do English. The first thing I’m gonna say, you have to have an onboarding experience. These are very easy to put in. And you can really just repurpose your screenshots from your iTunes account. But the number one thing that needs to happen is you need to tell people what they’re supposed to do first.
So, when it comes to inventory, there should be a pop up or there should be a screen that shows me, not only what the inventory is, but what do I need to do next. Right? So, I’m assuming I click this plus button, which I click here. I have no idea what these colors are. I’m assuming it’s like you can group things like in Google Calendar. Test here, and then I’m gonna click “done.” So that’s in my inventory.
Now, I’m gonna click it again. I’m gonna do a blue one, the blue testing, done. And so, you can start to see, all right, now I kinda get it. Now if I click blue tests, nothing happens. Today, again, I don’t know what today is gonna be about. I don’t know what test here is gonna be about. If I swipe it left, it goes remove. What’s gonna happen when I click out here, settings.
What happens in settings, POMI length. Short break, long break. [inaudible 00:17:04] really good is if you just, above all this, right above here like in the actual screen, you can embed a YouTube video, or you just say, “Hey, let me show you what this all means and why you should…you know, what the recommended length would be.”
And maybe have a few preset best practices. Like this default is the standard POMI default or whatever. And then you have one called the Terminator and you do a different set of lengths. And then you have one called Weekend Warrior and you’d have…you know, like the whole deal. And they can just press that and it gives them different set ups so it removes choice, right? Because at the end of the day, you always wanna remove choice, you just want them to do stuff.
So, we’re gonna go back. Website, I know what that’s all about. Support, Rate this app, Language. That’s all very straightforward. So, I think the biggest thing for me is, I don’t really understand what to do today. I’m trying to click the plus button. Okay, well, today. What does that mean? Nope, that goes back into my inventory. And I guess I’m not really sure.
Maybe it’s down here. I click the blue thing down here. And what does this do? What does the writing do? It didn’t do anything. What if I click checkbox inventory? There’s no current running task. Review. I go back. How do I get back to the home screen now? Right? That takes me back to the home screen. I guess this is supposed to be like a menu. I would call that out or I would let people know how to use this, right?
So I’m trying to click test here. It’s not working. I was trying to click today. So, I think that there’s something here. We did the market research. You know who you’re targeting. I think the biggest thing you need to work on is, you need to show people how to use this really, really effectively. You need to make videos, you need to do an onboarding experience, you need to just drill it into them, how to use it and how often you use it.
So, I think one of the best things you can do is like what headspace [SP] does where, you obviously have a great onboarding experience and then you say, “You should do this for five days.” It’s five days of the Pomodoro technique. Even if you only do it for 30 minutes a day, it’s how you get the most out of it. After you do it for five days, it becomes a habit or whatever. And then you start to, every day you do, “Hey it’s day two. Are you ready to do it?” Let me know. That can be a push notification.
But I think that you’ve got the baseline mechanics here. You obviously have the reporting and all that like we saw here. But the problem is that I just don’t know how to use this app. I honestly don’t know how to get started. I wanna go. I wanna do something. I wanna start, but I don’t know how to… I guess I can go, I can click this.
There’s currently no running task. Please add a task from the plans screen. Like, what do I do? Right? So, I guess we’ll stop there. That’s what I would say. I think you really got to work on the onboarding, get the user experience down. I think you really wanna dial in and start looking at this stuff. I would definitely go to this page, Pomodoro Technique, and I would start just studying this. I would read through all these comments and I would be like, you know, what kind of language are these guys using?
So look at this. I mean, this one is…this is written in English? This one is written in… No idea. This one’s written in English, right? Like, I would go through all these different things. I would see what these people are talking about. I would see what gets the most engagement. You know, I’d see what videos they’re sharing, all this sort of stuff.
I would see what other pages they like. Right? And you could see what other things that they like. And you can really start to dial in. So, that’s my audit. I don’t even know how long that was. I think the app is great, I think this is a terrific category. And then I would go from there. I think one last thing that I’ll do before we take off is check out this website.
I’m assuming this is what’s linked in your app. So, when you go here, the perfect Pomodoro tool: POMI. Plan, review, do. Good. So, the first thing you would do, you wanna add a retargeting pixel onto this. Go to Facebook, add a retargeting pixel. It’s a big thing so you can start to learn about the people visiting your site.
Let’s see what the code looks like on this. Let’s see with the footer. So if you don’t have Google Analytics on there, that’s the other thing you’ve got to put on there. Just load up Google Analytics. Maybe I’m missing this but let’s see… Yes. So that code is not in there, you definitely wanna add that so that you can start to drive traffic to this. This is good.
You might wanna get rid of the first name. You’re gonna get a higher conversion rate if you don’t have the first name in there. All this sort of thing. So yeah, I think, you know, this is a great start. You just need to use this as a data mine more than a sales tool at this point. But overall, man, you’re on the right track, and there’s definitely a lot of potential.
I think that from a branding standpoint, you really wanna get that more red in there so you can leverage what those guys are already doing but… Killer stuff, and I hope this has been helpful. Tomorrow we’ll do a whole new one. All right, guys, peace out.

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