Thanks for all of this feedback.
character said:
I think you make a good separation between dictionaries and other add-ons, which I'll call features. For features, I think you should provide more information about how they enhance each other, so people know OCR has a way to quickly create flashcards, etc etc.
Makes sense - we're actually hoping to highlight that distinction even more in the future, as we're now planning to start selling dictionaries outside of our app as well (since it seems to be within the rules and we'd very much like people to have a way to spend $100 on new dictionaries without having $30 of it go to Apple) and hence to push people towards buying their 'features' in-app and their dictionaries on our website.
character said:
I don't think it's against the rules to do A/B testing with add-on descriptions in the app and see what works best.
That I'd have to double-check on - Apple actually requires us to write up an official description of each IAP that goes in their database and gets reviewed / approved like any other bit of App Store text, but it's not clear what the requirements are concerning the display of that versus other text that we might come up with instead.
character said:
Goodreader has a "what's new in this version" popup which appears the first time you launch it after an update. You could do the same, and mention any new enhancements to add-ons.
Very logical, yes.
Alexis said:
Also, I was a bit puzzled by the meaning of "non-dict" (at least I assume the meaning of this would be puzzling for the new user) in the Bundle descriptions. Maybe a better name might be "Extensions" for the non-dictionary add-ons. In such a case, it may be clearer to group the add-ons in each tab under categories (ie. Bundles, Dictionaries, Extensions).
Yes, "non-dict add-ons" is a terrible turn of phrase.
Alexis said:
Edit: Also, I don't see a need to list free/paid separately.
I believe we did that one originally because we were trying really hard to get people to download CC-CEDICT on iOS too (it's optional on iOS, unlike on Android, largely because we wanted to keep our basic app under what at the time was a 20MB limit on download size). But now that we're planning to build in CC along with PLC it might indeed make sense to bury / categorize it.
scykei said:
I disagree. I for one, hate watching video walkthroughs. I'm not going to spend my time on that if I can help it. It would even prefer a help in text than video because it is easier to jump to whichever relevant parts that I want to read. If it were a video, I have to watch everything whether I like it or not before I can find what I want.
Videos that demonstrate what it can do overall is fine for advertising, but not video walkthroughs.
I don't care for them either, but a lot of people seem to find them far preferable to reading, so I think there's something to be said for both approaches - come up with a script and then simultaneously offer it in video and screenshots-with-text form. Videos make sense for advertising too - rapidly go through the features to make them ooh and aah and overwhelm them with the sheer quantity of stuff we have on offer - but making detailed instructional videos available might actually help in persuading people to hit "buy."
Alexis said:
Maybe a more subtle way of pushing addons is to internally use a a Number badge on the Add-ons icon (only visible when the user presses the fan/menu icon). The number in the badge would be the number of new/updated addons, and would go away as soon as the add-ons screen is visited. The badge would only return when there is a new add-on and/or a purchased/downloaded add-on has been updated.
Possibly, but in other apps I've found that if anything that has the opposite of the desired effect - I go to that screen with the single-minded purpose of getting rid of the annoying red dot and don't bother reading what it has to say.
scykei said:
It will happen over time. Don't take away things that people already like. You don't want this amazing app to have people start complaining that they want the old version back, or saying they are "lucky to have saved a backup of the old version of the app", do you?
character said:
I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree; I don't see that what I've suggested is horrible. The free version of Pleco exists to sell add-ons; it's a not a gift to the world from a philanthropist. I want Pleco the company to make enough money to remain viable and keep developing Pleco app improvements.
This back-and-forth is quite interesting - thanks - and hints at a number of larger "what do we want to be?" questions that I've been pondering for some time now.
An awful lot of our revenue now comes from a tiny percentage of our active users, those enthusiastic enough to buy more-or-less every dictionary we sell (and, as an added bonus, to tell all of their friends to buy them too), and it's absolutely critical that we not do anything to disappoint that group, or turn away potential future members of that group. So in some respects we are already much more like Temple Run than Angry Birds - instead of getting $1 or $2 from every user, we get nothing from 95% of them and a lot more than $1-$2 each from a small subset. Since those users were the only users we had in the Palm/WM days, it seemed natural to keep them our primary focus on iOS, hence the lack of ads / unobtrusive promotion of add-ons / etc.
But it does feel like we're also leaving a lot of money on the table this way, and even more so in future updates as we hopefully get our UI design to rise above its current "competent but unexciting" and up to the level that gets people to pay for other apps purely on the basis of looks (e.g. weather apps, many of which don't actually do anything more than the built-in iOS weather app but still sell a zillion copies). Assuming we don't want to start charging a few dollars for our basic app, and I don't think we do, and that we don't want to make the prettier design itself a paid add-on (which would probably cost us more in programming time to implement than it would make us in extra sales), it would be nice to find a way to get a little money out of people who are enjoying our app but aren't inclined to pay $10 or $20 for it.
This may simply be a question of making some add-ons cheaper - take some little new features and charge $1 or $2 for them: part-of-speech tags for PLC, say, or a 楷体 font for headwords, or a most-common-few-thousand-characters version of our stroke order module, stuff that still requires users to find their way to the "Add-ons" screen but doesn't require a great leap to purchase once they're there. There's a risk of seeming to nickel-and-dime people, but as long as we give most of it away for free to people who buy / have already bought a bundle, it seems like it would mostly be a positive thing. But I'm not sure how much extra money any of this would actually make.
Basically it boils down to a question of whether people are unaware of our add-ons or just uninterested. If the former, it seems like finding a few small tasteful ways to direct them towards the Add-ons screen probably would help; if the latter, we then have to decide whether to accept that they're not interested and focus on the people who are, or to attempt to get some money out of those uninterested people anyway through ads or cheaper optional features or other such things.