How LATCH helped me organize my UI

A great user interface is focused.

Reduction is a key element to ensure that your user interface leads the user to the features intuitively. If done well it leads to a nice user experience.

Especially on the small mobile form factor properly planning your features and the users flow through your app is a key to success.

Having a cumbersome UI ensures that the user will not return to use your app. Thereby increasing your churn ratio. Churn ratio is one of the main reasons your app loses money.

Three things to remember :

1. The probability of selling to an existing customer is higher than selling to a new customer.
2. A happy existing customer is more likely to refer their friends and family to your business.
3. Finding, persuading, and converting new customers can be five times more expensive than keeping existing customers.

How will your future customers use your app and stay?

So where to start?

What are some of the steps on planning your app-flow?

If we’re talking user experience it’s mostly how people access the information presented (or not presented). I.e., how people search.

What information is relevant for the user? What information needs to be quickly available ?

Fortunately we’ve got LATCH for that! The acronym LATCH stands for a principle of information retrieval in information systems.

1. Location
2. Alphabet
3. Time
4. Category
5. Hierarchy.

Most of my apps are geospatial and focused around the point in time a user queries for information. So for me that basically covers points 1 and 3 right of the bat.

Let’s take the example of one of our latest apps drop!in. Drop!in is an event aggregation app that aims to solve “nearby events happening now” urban event discovery.

How to people search for events?

In general, sorting by Alphabet is not a primary search criteria for events.

When people are looking for events they are interested in the where, when, and what. Or in other words : Location, Time, Category

For example :

“Bangkok, Sunday morning 8 AM, Sports” leads to “Facebook : Yoga on the beach”.

“Singapore, Friday evening 5 PM, Social” leads to “Meetup : Hub Beer Party”.

The app is providing a hierarchy of events relevant to the users search terms (relative location, relative timing, and to add relevance to the user data from our magical machine learning model based on the users event usage and other relevant predictive characteristics)

With this information given, we can already build a sufficient hierarchy to present in our app and define the main workflow presented to the user.

However, people might have other use cases. What is going on close to my home today or what is starting around lunchtime somewhere in town?

That’s why in our example app, the user can change the recommended hierarchy by looking into events by distance and starting time. Thus giving with one tap a powerful tool to reorder search results in the main screen.

Category is an important driver for event recommendations. Here the app gives the user the ability to search by category as well. Naturally, the category results are sorted alphabetically.

All information that the user needs are easily accessible within one tap. If information needs to be refreshed, it is a simple drag down. So all the frequently applied interactions with the app are nearby.

Most customers change their preferences only rarely. That’s why the link to the settings menu is only available via the sidebar menu.

While planning this app, we used the LATCH principle to outline the main use cases and thus the data flow. We had of course some assumptions how users would then use the app. These assumptions were either validated or invalidated with the usage data retrieved from the application. And clearly, version 1.0 is nowhere near to what you can currently get in the App store.

And that’s our thoughts and analysis that have driven the app design for drop!in using the LATCH principle.