How to Make Product Improvements & Add New Features for an Existing Product

Have you released a digital product? Congratulations! Yet, your tech journey has only started.

In today’s fast-paced world, no software can completely meet its users’ needs. Likewise, there is no such thing as a perfect digital product. Thus, your software must evolve as new technologies arise and customer requirements change.

About 31% of businesses globally invest in the latest technologies to add new product features. Another 47% of companies state that they need innovations to support their end users.

So why wait? Update your software and get your audience’s approval. Yet, it’s not that easy to improve existing products. You may baffle your loyal audience with unexpected changes. Let’s figure out how to update your product smoothly to prevent such consequences.

Arounda will talk about best practices for improving products and adding new features, along with how to announce the update’s launch. You’ll better comprehend this drawing on our MintySwap case’s example.

What Is Product Improvement?

Product improvement is a process that involves improving existing features or implementing new ones into your software. These changes serve several purposes: to attract new users, retain existing customers, and win back lost clients.

Two Approaches: Improving Existing or Adding New Features

You have two ways to enhance your product. These are new features integration or the existing ones’ improvement. Let’s discuss these approaches separately.

Adding New Features

Product new features expand the capabilities of your software and its use cases. As a rule, the announcement of extra functionality causes a surge in the market and attracts new customers’ attention. Your existing audience, in turn, gets a more valuable product.

Yet, adding product new functions may be tricky. You are always at risk, as fresh features may not interest either new or existing customers. Therefore, before implementing such functionality, ensure it will find a response among users.

Improving Existing Features

Speaking of existing feature improvement, you have three different ways to do it.

1. Intentional Improvements

Intentional improvements aim at meeting the needs of your current audience. You make advancements like this when you have a feature that your users already like. You also understand why they love it and see opportunities to improve it.

2. Frequency Improvements

You make such improvements when you want your customers to start using this or that feature more often. First, choose a functionality you think is undervalued by users and implement available means to enhance it.

3. Adoption Improvements

Adoption improvements aim to attract your customers to use a feature that you think is noteworthy. That is, it must be functionality that didn’t find a response in your audience. You should see ways to make it easier for your customers to interact with the feature.

Each of these improvements carries certain risks. For example, your users may not like changes to the existing functionality that they are used to. Hence, you must conduct a business analysis and carefully study your audience’s needs before making changes to your product.

Best Practices to Make Product Improvements & Add New Features

Decided to improve your product design? Let’s make this process as effortless as possible. For this, we have prepared a step‑by‑step guide with best practices for digital product improvement.

Step 1. Define the Issue You’re Solving

It is one of the primary steps in the product design process, as it sets a purpose for your feature. If your function doesn’t help the user solve some problem or pain point, then why implement it?

Define the issue you want to solve and describe it in detail. You can do this by identifying the type of users experiencing this problem and studying audience feedback. Next, write down a potential solution to the issue and goals you want to achieve.

Step 2. Set Clear Goals and Feature Requirements

Much like the issue, the goals of your feature should also be clear. See how you can make your objectives transparent:

• Make sure the purpose of your feature is specific. For example, “the product attracts 5000 users within the first month after release”.

• Your goal should also be measurable. So you can check whether you have fully achieved it. For example, “increase in user retention by 10%.”

• The goal of product improvement must be achievable, among other things. Strong ambitions are great, but weigh your capabilities against the potential benefits.

Step 3. Study User Feedback and Metrics

Before you start the development process to improve your product, don’t forget to study user feedback and consider key metrics.

You can get feedback on social networks by studying your product’s support service requests, user testing, or using available analytics tools. Among the metrics, you should consider customer retention and churn rates, lifetime value, daily active users, etc.

Step 4. Study Your Idea Thoroughly

At this stage, you’ve learned everything about your users’ needs and defined the problem and goals you want to achieve. Which specific solution do you want to implement?

You may have several ideas at once, and that’s okay. You need to test them to determine the best possible option. For example, you can research existing products that already offer such a feature. See exactly how other developers have implemented it and make it even better.

Step 5. Describe Your Solution

Create a feature specification document. There you must outline the idea and the process of its implementation. Next, talk to your designers and developers so they can recommend the best ways to incorporate the feature. 

After documenting the improvement process, you can move on to its visualization. These can be feature sketches, mockups, or visual studies.

Step 6. Test Your Mockups

In this step, you need to test mockups of the feature you want to implement. You can do this within your team or company and then test it with real users. It will help you understand if the feature is working correctly and if it meets your audience’s needs.

Step 7. Implement Digital Product Design Improvements

After all the checks, you can proceed directly to implementing the feature. It’s vital that the functionality you add is consistent with your product and works great on different platforms.

How to Announce New Features to an Active User Base?

Before implementing a new feature or improvement in your digital product, you must prepare your audience for it. It is crucial since users are reluctant to change and may be unpleasantly shocked by any updates.

If you properly prepare the audience for new features release, you will be able to:

• Raise the retention rate

• Increase audience loyalty

• Re-engage your users

The strategy for announcing new product features can be as follows:

Show users the purpose of product improvements

Outline what your feature will do and what users will get from it.

Determine the new feature’s target users

Every feature of your product has its target user. One function will be valuable for some but not so relevant for others. Therefore, you should focus on the feature’s target audience and announce its release to interested users.

Determine the new feature’s priority

Not all features of your product are equally in demand. If you are releasing a feature with a high-priority level, it’s better to announce its launch through as many channels as possible. If the feature has a slightly lower priority or is a minor improvement, you may not need to give it a lot of air time.

Determine where you plan to announce the new feature

Depending on the target audience and feature’s priority, you can choose several channels to promote improvements. It can be inside your product, company blog, email, or social media.

Arounda’s Experience in Product Improvements

Arounda has significant experience in improving existing products and adding new features. For this, we conduct business analysis and a thorough UX audit. As a result, we select the most effective strategies for executing app or web design improvements.

One of the recent projects we enhanced was MintySwap. It’s a digital marketplace for crypto collectibles and non-fungible tokens. This platform allows you to buy, sell, and find exclusive digital assets freely.

To implement improvements to MintySwap, we conducted a comprehensive UX audit. We identified the platform’s issues and limitations and which specific features need to be changed. As a result, our team delivered a new UX/UI design.

Final Thoughts

Product improvements are necessary for keeping your product relevant. Updating your digital product will help you stay competitive and increase the loyalty of your audience.

You can either enhance existing features or create new ones. Regardless of the chosen approach, you can re-engage your audience and attract new users. And we hope that our step-by-step guide will help you with this.

If you need a product improvement here and now, we can help. Relying on the extensive experience in business analysis and UX audit, Arounda specialists will implement the most effective features for your specific software. Got interested? Feel free to contact us.