App Unbundling
Simplifying apps by breaking out their experiences.
The monolithic app
Things like the hamburger nav and off canvas navigation have become the staple of most mobile experiences. It’s become a problem though. We’ve taken advantage of these metaphors to cram in more stuff and overload these experiences beyond what they should be.
Mobile apps aren’t meant to house everything plus the kitchen sink. Hell, most users only use 20% of your experience. Think about that. All those added features may never be used. Not to mention the money spent to implement those features wasted. Mobile usage is meant to be fast and focused.
Lets look at the numbers
The average total app usage is 2 hours 51 minutes a day. That time spans across the average number of apps used per month which is 26.8. Combine that with the average app installs which are roughly around 26 apps on per phone.
Add all that up and users don’t spend a lot of time in any one single app, its a fast and focused limited set of apps. They focus that usage based on the context. For example, that could be looking at a bank account, taking a picture, sharing that picture, seeing comments and notifications, reviewing product reviews. In and out — that’s the nature of these devices and experiences.
It seems as though there’s a limit to how many apps people utilize. There may be an app for every need, but theres not a need for every app.
Faster iterations
The by-product of efficiently unbundling is the ability to iterate faster. Without the need of compromising an existing app with all the Q&A and testing needed to push a new build, a new unbundled app can have its advantages with faster iterations to customers. One thing to mention here is to avoid falling into the trap of “lets throw something at the wall and see if it sticks.” Instead make thoughtful decisions on how/what should be unbundled.
Let’s take a look at Foursquare. Foursquare found that 5% of Foursquare’s users were opening the app to find friends and a restaurant. That left 95% of its users opening the app to find either a recommendation-based result or to check-in — hence the decision to split the app into two apps: Foursquare and now Swarm.
Consumer apps & enterprise apps
We’ve seen some consumer executions of unbundling, some good, some bad, some we’re not sure. Things like Facebook, Foursquare, and LinkedIn to name a few. This isn’t just a consumer focused problem. There are several companies that have large, cumbersome internal applications that could benefit from taking the correct approach to unbundling. Time sheets, expense reports, annual reviews, I’m sure everyone has experienced those.
This may be the case that most organizations don’t believe their internal employee experience is as important as the external facing customer experience. I can tell you that your internal employee experience directly affects your outward facing customer experience, plain and simple.
Plan
Don’t look at it as an after thought. If you’re unbundling an experience just because your current app has became to large, or if you want to break out features because of internal organizational challenges, then you need to step away. First, look at user feedback, do some observational user research and look at some user data. Analyze that data and understand what’s happening at a user experience level. Then, prototype, prototype, prototype. As they say, prototyping is worth 1,000 meetings, and we all know how much we love meetings.
Define how
When it comes to executing the unbundling approach there have been several new and interesting approaches that have come about. On the Apple iOS side they started to allow apps to be bundled in the AppStore. This gives the customer the ability to not only download a single focused app but also in one tap complete the app bundle and download all related apps in that bundle.
Another interesting feature is what’s called App Extensions, this feature is most commonly described as a way for third-party applications to talk to each other. The power of this is utilizing the ability to have inter app communication be much easier and seamless, making unbundling even more powerful and efficient to build.
Another key experience is the on boarding process of these unbundled apps. Lets take LinkedIn as another example. If you already have the original LinkedIn App and download the LinkedIn Connected App it automatically knows who you are and prompts you to login as that person. This makes the on-boarding/sign up process seamless for the customer which again adds to the holistic experience across all apps.
Remember
Think holistically about the experience and it’s interactions.
Ask if it makes sense.
Look at the data.
Gather user feedback.
Prototype.
Execute the approach.
It’s all about how these fast/focused experiences effect the overall holistic experience.
I am the Director of User Experience / Research & Development at Universal Mind — A Digital Solutions Agency. You can follow me on twitter at @merhl.
