WP7 Advertising results for FINDaPAD

A previous post detailed how FINDaPAD was selected for the Nokia WP7 April ad campaign in the UK - more info can be found here.

For us the ad campaign has been very successful, we've doubled our total number of downloads in a month, okay we didn't have many in the first place but doubling the number of 'units sold' in a month always sound good!

The ad campaign ran for 4 weeks and started on or around the 1st of April. Before the campaign started we'd only had approximately 600 hundred downloads with the previous month showing 87 downloads:

As I said the campaign had the affect of doubling our total number of downloads to approximately 1400:

Interestingly the above graph has two peaks, the second is explained away as a patch release we did (2.1) - a few bug fixes. The interesting factor about the second peak is there are about 200 users who had downloaded the update from the marketplace in the subsequent week.

Does this figure represent our true number of repeat users?

I believe so...

The first peak shows a pretty standard exponential decay from the peak of downloading on the 7th of April, to be honest I didn't know what to expect...

Another way to measure success or failure with the app is via the comments left in the marketplace. Unfortunately we only received 1 more comment over the period and this wasn't at all positive.

As I've blogged before I believe the marketplace is missing functionality - there's no way for us to contact this user and help out with this miss understanding. The user has failed to grasp they can in fact enter a full post code (zip code), place name or a lat-long position in the text box on the UI. From this users perspective the app has completely failed to deliver value...

We followed the Metro design guidelines where possible and tried to keep the UI clean & clear and place buttons on the application bar where possible. It's become clear we need to do more from a users perspective on how to use the application.

Comments

Showing a message box from a ViewModel in MVVM

I was doing a code review with a client last week for a WPF app using MVVM and they asked ' How can I show a message from the ViewModel? '. What follows is how I would (and have) solved the problem in the past. When I hear the words ' show a message... ' I instantly think you mean show a transient modal message box that requires the user input before continuing ' with something else ' - once the user has interacted with the message box it will disappear. The following solution only applies to this scenario. The first solution is the easiest but is very wrong from a separation perspective. It violates the ideas behind the Model-View-Controller pattern because it places View concerns inside the ViewModel - the ViewModel now knows about the type of the View and specifically it knows how to show a message box window: The second approach addresses this concern by introducing the idea of messaging\events between the ViewModel and the View. In the example ...

WPF tips & tricks: Dispatcher thread performance

Not blogged for an age, and I received an email last week which provoked me back to life. It was a job spec for a WPF contract where they want help sorting out the performance of their app especially around grids and tabular data. I thought I'd shared some tips & tricks I've picked up along the way, these aren't probably going to solve any issues you might be having directly, but they might point you in the right direction when trying to find and resolve performance issues with a WPF app. First off, performance is something you shouldn't try and improve without evidence, and this means having evidence proving you've improved the performance - before & after metrics for example. Without this you're basically pissing into the wind, which can be fun from a developer point of view but bad for a project :) So, what do I mean by ' Dispatcher thread performance '? The 'dispatcher thread' or the 'UI thread' is probably the most ...

Managing themes in WPF

Having just published Simple.Wpf.Terminal as a nuget package I wanted the ability to skin the user control - the more flexibility in the way it looks the more likely it will be used by other devs :) Before getting into the detail, lets look at the solution working in the test harness for my WPF F# REPL Engine , shown below are four different themes applied dynamically at run-time - no recompilation required to change the theme: Previously in larger WPF apps I've relied upon third-party control vendors like Telerik to provide theming support. Typically they provide good solutions to the problem with multiple themes supported as standard, and when you're already using their third party controls the use of their themes makes sense. But when you're developing a small UI component you don't want to add (& support) such a large footprint just to add themes to your niche control. A theme is a collection of Styles grouped into a ResourceDictionary in WPF. A ...

Awkward Coder

Search This Blog