Utility Isn’t Enough

What we learned while drastically increasing the engagement on our utility app by adding a unique social experience.

If you’re trying to make a big splash in the app world, utility itself is simply not enough anymore.

A bit of background on our app

Spectafy connects people to location-specific answers, visually. It’s meant to get people moving, and get them information about locations in real-time without having to leave where they are – so that they can plan and move more efficiently. One of the biggest superpowers of our app is its focus on community, on togetherness, and helping each other.

It’s also the biggest thing we weren’t executing on at the beginning of our beta.

The funny thing is we were short-sighted at first in bringing this vision of our community to life within our app.

We had the utility and the mechanics wrapped up nicely, but something was missing. People were able to request images, ask for information, take photos and get their information – but it just didn’t feel like enough. It didn’t “stick”.

The breakthrough

Early in our beta we learned a fundamental truth, that in this socially connected world, utility alone just wasn’t enough. We had to make it social, we had to ramp up the interest, we had to make it interactive.

See, our users wanted to connect to the information they wanted, but we didn’t realize how much they wanted to connect to the information other people were requesting and sharing. That was the big breakthrough.

They knew something was missing. Users couldn’t connect with the information or the people who shared it nearly enough. We added the ability to upvote content — it makes a huge difference! Users upvote to both give kudos to the person that shared and also to promote this information as valuable to the rest of the community around them. This works to connect the community just like Reddit, Quora, and Product Hunt.

Imagine Reddit without an up-vote/down-vote… what would be the point! right? That’s what we found out the hard way. Good thing we didn’t realize that too late!

So now not only is Spectafy a wonderful place to explore your own plans, it’s a place to discover entirely new plans, based on what your neighbors around you are doing!

What we learned about our app, and utility apps in general:

When doing early testing, we hadn’t yet worked hard on ‘fun’ features as we focused on the nuts and bolts. What we found through testing is simply: user’s don’t just want to take info and run in a transactional manner. They want to browse, interact with content (upvote, comments, etc.), and interact with other users (upvote their posts, follow, etc.).

This sounds simple, and straight-forward, but you would be surprised by how little this is on your radar when you’re in the trenches building your app. You want to get the groundwork laid out, and you sometimes forget what will get you more users – getting people excited.

We have found that if you want to work your way into user’s minds (and hopefully the front page of their phone home screen) it is important to not just be social and not just offer utility — but a healthy mix of both. Offer a fun and socially connected experience built around helping each other and not just taking value from the app, but also giving value and being rewarded for it.

To scratch an itch, or build a back scratcher?

There is so much out there in the app space that just scratching an itch isn’t enough (unless it’s a huge itch!). Solutions have to be fun and engaging too. This is especially the case if your entire app strategy is built around a very engaged community not only getting useful information out of the app, but also helping other users (like Waze, Yelp, and Spectafy!).

So, in this new age of apps that both scratch an itch, and deliver a new avenue to connect – utility is not enough anymore. Social is not enough on its own either. Facebook will beat you if you just try to create another social giant. The key is to find that balance between utility and social interaction – and make it work in a way that people will be excited to see, use, and share with others. In a way, by adding social to your utility app it enables your app to not only help the person using it, but can help multiple people at once through the connection of information – in this way, social can compound utility.

Think Pinterest, Waze, Snapchat, Instagram, and Foursquare. They all capitalize on a niche, while looping social interaction into the heart of it all. Some apps that are just a utility still survive, like Fandango for example – but if they really wanted to make something special they would dominate the social movie experience. They’ve got the perfect trojan horse by leading people into engaging in the movie with their phone before the movie starts, they just need to loop it back around and increase social engagement. It just makes sense.

That’s the breakthrough we had with Spectafy. Social and utility together, it just makes sense.

This post was originally published on the Spectafy blog.

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