Tandem Bikes, Cara Delevingne’s Eyebrows and Building Better Apps.
Laying comfortably next to the three-thousandth copy of Flappy Birds and a foreign knock off of Clear, called Klear+, sits your app. A lonely 1 in 1,200,000. Joining the App Store sediment is quite the norm though. And considering analyst house Gartner prediction that by 2018 less than only 0.01 percent of apps will be considered financial successes, the future looks dim.
From my experience building my last two apps (Weather Dial & ElephantBites) though, I see a glimmer of hope. Now, while I haven’t gold-plated my Hyundai with their earnings yet, I would consider their traction a success. The source of their success I would argue lies in the form of a Venn Diagram and 3 questions. Whenever I sit down to build any product, I filter all my decisions and ideas through 3 questions; Is is remarkable (or more literally, would anyone remark about it?), is it beautiful (are people innately drawn to it?), and is it simple (will users understand it, or will it frustrate them?).
The following is the absolute foundation to anything I build or have built. Along with some thoughts on each and the resources that have influenced the composition of these 3 simple rules:
1. Be Remarkable.
“Unusual or surprising: likely to be noticed” — Merriam Webster
If you commute to work, you probably see thousands of cars a day. Just a backdrop of beige. Nothing really to remark about. You probably wouldn’t get home to your significant other that night, regaling excitedly about the cars you saw. Alternatively though, if in your morning commute you saw Hulk Hogan riding a platinum tandem bike with Mr. T … well, lets not play games, you would be texting any friend that would listen and trying to post to vine while avoiding crashing into the beige van in front of you.
It’d be, remarkable.
In Seth Godin’s 2003 TED Talk on How to get your ideas to spread and in his book Purple Cow, he brilliantly explains why in a sea of ordinary and safe, the extraordinary rises to the top. The seventeen minute talk, though, could be dissolved into this simple quote:
“The thing that decides what gets talked about … is, is it remarkable? … [or ] worth making a remark about?”
So why is building something unique tantamount to success? Simple. By building something remarkable you are basically building a marketing system into the very fabric of your product. The more unique and remarkable something is, the more people will talk about it. The better story you give blogs, the more likely they are to blog about it.
In 2012 I released Weather Dial into a saturated market and saw 30,000 paid downloads in the first few days, without saying a word to anyone. It had less features then free versions in the same category. So what made it so successful? It was remarkable. It was something people hadn’t seen before. I would actually put the full blame of Weather Dial’s success on its uniqueness.
“An absurd rarity, you realize, as soon as you load it.” — Fast Company
Now that’s a nice remark!
Then, this January, I launched my second app, ElephantBites, into what’s arguably the most saturated category in the app store, productivity. Using the same strategy as Weather Dial. Now, while it hasn’t been a financial success, it has seen some download love, with over 1–2,000 downloads a day over the last view weeks and 25,000+ in the first few months. So what got the downloads? It’s weird. It contains remarkable illustrations and the unique analogy of eating elephants. A fun spin on the check-list that hasn’t been seen before. If you haven’t seen it before, the chances you’ll talk about it are pretty dang high. Hulk Hogan and Mr. T on a tandem bike high.
What about your product makes someone want to remark about it?
2. Be Beautiful.
“The details are not the details. They make the design.” — Charles Eames
Now, setting aside your tastes and personal preferences, its fairly safe to argue that objective beauty exists; the curves of a vintage Porsche, Michelangelo’s David, Cara Delevingne’s eyebrows (ok, that might be subjective). All, innately attractive. The hidden and refined details of the Porsche. The composition, balance and supreme crafstmenship of the sculpture. The symmetry in a model’s face. All contain foundational principles of design, and all possess almost invisible details that are more ‘felt’ then seen.
The details are really what differentiate the good, from the great. That icon with a pixel off, the font with bad kerning, the fade-in animation that’s just too fast, and that color that’s just too saturated are all examples of visual disruption a user will naturally feel.
“We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent.” — Steve Jobs
When building Weather Dial I went through pain staking measures to make sure everything just ‘felt’ right. Details like finding the perfect rounded font to compliment the rounded edges of the icons, something no one would ever be aware of, but like the soft curves of that Porsche, you can feel the result of that intent.
Beauty then becomes a natural attractor to users. A competetive edge between your app and the 4,000 sitting next to it. It’s also another way to make your app remarkable (a two for one deal, sweet). Especially if you’re bringing beauty into a beauty-less industry (think mundane business apps).
Taking your app to that next level comes down to just a brute desire for it to be so. If you’re a developer, this means partnering with a designer you think has the skills to accomplish this. If you are a designer it means refining your craft. This means mastering the fundamentals. One of my favorite resources discussing these these details and the psychology behind it is Universal Principles of Design. It is filled with brilliant insight from things like ‘Attractiveness Bias’ to using Archetypes (universal patterns of theme and form resulting from innate biase or dispositions) and also touches on simplicity and how far you can push it before becoming unusable.
What unseen details breed attractiveness in your app?
3. Be Simple.
“Simplicity is complexity unseen.” — David Elgena (I think I just made that up now?)
Apple is almost synonymous with simplicity now. It’s practically a cliche at this point, with good reason. Apple has reduced and hidden the complexity of what was rooms of electronics fifty years ago, to a thin piece of glass, aluminum and a home button. We should all petition to change the word ‘simple’ in the dictionary to just ‘iPhone’. “Wow, that was so iPhone”. “That test was way more iPhone then I thought it was going to be.” But I digress. The point being, they were able to reduce an absurd amount of complexity, skin a simple UI over it all and now anyone from your grandma to your 1-year-old nephew can facetime with you from across the world.
Take the problem you are trying to solve, and reduce it to its simplest form.
The easier and simpler your app is to use, the less frustrated users will be and the better their experience becomes. Find ways to hide complexity. Simplify your color usage, the less color you use, the more powerful color becomes as a directional tool for the eye. Simplify your font variations, don’t make your user work to read things. Is there something you are asking the user to do that you can automate? Things like this become the underlying user experience. The simpler you navigate the user to your apps value, the quicker you’ll retain that user.
One example of simplicity is the above rethinking of Weather Dial, I’ll be releasing Weather Dial 2 in a few weeks. One of the centralized themes around this redesign was ‘less and more’. One of the ways we achieved this was by spreading out rather complex data into digestible chunks, rather then trying to cram everything into a single screen. By hiding and surfacing specific data at the best time, we are able to really reduce the app to its simplest form, while adding a lot of value for the user.
Ironically, simplicity is quite a complex topic. I could talk about it for hours, so I’m just going to abrubtly stop my rant here and point you to John Maeda’s, The Laws of Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life, because, well, he’s brilliant and does an amazing job explaining everything you need to know about simplicity in a fairly short read.
What complexities can you remove/hide/reduce?
Be remarkable. Be beautiful. Be Simple.
Now go build something!
