“Your App Isn’t Designed For Humans”

This is reason #7 on the “8 Reasons Your App Sucks” list over at Forbes, but it should really be #1 when describing today’s app market.

Consider fitness apps for example. There are now well over 10,000 Fitness apps on both the Apple and Google Play stores combined. Yet walking into a gym on any given day unveils a staggering number of gymaholics tracking their workouts via the antiquated pencil-and-paper method. Given that most of these gym-goers do, in fact, have their handy devices in their pockets, you might wonder why they don’t put these devices to use.

Why is it that pencil-and-paper is still so popular when there is a plethora of app choices to displace this archaic method? It becomes quite apparent, after exploring the options, that most of these apps were clearly not designed for humans.

An ideal gym tracking app to replace pencil-and-paper would need to do the following:

1. Track the exercises you do today.
2. See those results the next time you’re at the gym.

And that’s it.

Naturally, the only fitness apps we get on the app market attempt to do a whole lot more. They encourage users to set schedules, tap in milestones, follow graphic instructions, post to Facebook and Twitter, or take post-workout selfies. As for actually logging the workout? Turns out that’s a superfluous pipeline of menus, buttons and custom keyboards which don’t even have a lbs button or a way to jot down a weight that isn’t a whole number (ever heard of the 22.5lb dumbbell?)

Popular apps like ‘Clear’ manage to dominate the to-do list app segment, and apps like ‘Fitocracy Macros’ manage to best other calorie-tracking apps; both for the same reason. They, unlike most apps, do one thing, and do it seamlessly. Most apps today however, suffer the jack-of-all-trades syndrome — they attempt to solve all of the user’s problems in one single app.

Consequences of this syndrome then include:

1. Developers having to now develop and maintain multiple features; time spent on each feature is decreased, and each feature becomes less polished.
2. Extra time and money becomes required for development of UI and design of UX, so that the entire app can still work cohesively.
3. And the fatal issue: the app itself becomes heavy (size-wise) or requires external-data pulling to get new content; both of which make an app slow to boot and/or use.

All of these things affect an app’s quality, feasibility, and user experience. Largely, end users just want an app to solve their particular problem in a simple way.

So how do we cure this jack-of-all-trades syndrome?

Stop trying to solve everyone’s problem with an app that does everything. People have too many problems — specific and unique problems — and it is futile to try and solve them all in one stone. If there was a way to solve everyone’s problem with a single app, we wouldn’t need to have an Appstore at all. So let’s all take a moment, and vow to build bite-sized apps that solve compact, core problems, and solve them well.