Creating a differentiated experience - Key to App Store Success
The Application Marketplace phenomenon has spread like wild fire since the introduction of Apple’s App Store. Since then, it has caught the attention of almost every OEM and Operator who has launched (or in the process of launching) App Marketplaces. All the App Stores, together, now have hundreds of thousands of Apps developed by thousands of developers.
However differentiating your application from amongst thousands of other applications and catching the attention of the user to download and use the application is not an easy task. Winning or missing the cut in the crowded App Stores depends on a variety of factors.
Recently a team of developers from Infosys participated in a contest to develop an iPhone application for GAP INC. and won the “People’s Choice Award” from among 400+ applications submitted. Tom Kaneshige recently wrote an article about the winning entries on CIO.com titled “Five Qualities of a Great iPhone App” - an interesting summary of lessons learnt from this Gap Application contest. I wanted to reiterate upon some of the points from this article as well as add my perspectives about what makes a winning recipe for a successful application:
- Keeping it simple but intuitive: Creating a differentiated UI experience and a good visual design is at the top of the mind for any developer. Often times, an overly designed UI results in the experience becoming non-intuitive. The steeper the learning curve is, the less the probability for the users to come back. Keeping the visual design appealing but at the same time developing the UI in a way users get it right the first time is a very important factor determining the success of the app.
- Build upon Native features and behaviors: This again goes back to the intuitiveness and learnability of the application. Utilizing the native behaviors of the phone to build the features and experience is very important. For example, an iPhone app utilizing a cover-flow (instead of a grid view) and a pinch (instead of a zoom in/out button) makes it easy for a user.
- Giving a Personalized experience: Any user can vouch for the fact that amongst hundreds of Apps they download; only a few apps are used almost on regular basis. And if you see these most used apps, they build upon a basic human need or they become a part of an essential day-to-day activity. For example, the virtual trial room in the Gap4Me application builds upon on the basic human need of having to see how a dress I select looks on me.
- Making it an engaging experience with a rich feature set: A rich set of features to engage the users truly determines that “differentiated” experience. A lot of apps just provide either too less a feature set or too much of features packaged into one. Striking the right balance and packaging an application with a rich-feature set that really fits well within the usage context of that application is a highly successful recipe for an Application.
Comments
Hi Sandeep,
I am working on iPhone applications.Here are my views about the success of every app.
1. As you said, user interface is very important for product success.Because at the end only user is going to see the screens they dont want to know what logic goes beyond the screen.
2.It should be more responsive.While developing the app we have to think as end user as well.It does not solve the purpose if we having so many features and not responsive app.
3. Target users - While developing the app we have to keep the target users in mind...
4. keep the app up to the purpose- Instead of adding so many features and make the app as buggy and jerky we can keep the application features as required and make the application as more easy to use.
It's nice to see the mobile application discussion over here..
Commented by: Sakthivel | April 4, 2010 12:36 PM