British Red Cross Baby and child first aid app: when a digital ‘lick of paint’ is more than just lipstick (sic) service
What do I have in common with an estate agent? On the surface of it, very little - I don’t sell houses or flats for a living. However, we both understand the importance of appearances. Peruse any popular property website and you can immediately see this in action - a grey day turned azure blue, a poky kitchen appears positively roomy, a weedy garden looks like a wildflower haven for bees. All these ‘tweaks’ are designed to open doors. Converting to a successful sale? That depends on what’s behind the door, the foundations, the inherent value of the space and if your filters are exposed, it will be a brave soul that signs on the dotted line.
What, you may ask, has this got to do with an app design refresh? Well, quite a bit from my perspective and it comes down to three Cs- Caring, Communication and Confidence.
Our Baby and child first aid app is nearly 8 years old, positively a pensioner and yet it stoically holds on to its 4.5 stars reviews, 5,000 odd downloads a month and top 100 ranking in its app category. We’ve consistently heard the refrain ‘if it ain’t broke’ and so, aside from critical content updates, it has remained largely untouched since its launch in 2013. But this has done our users a disservice and limited our impact. Our design refresh is a chance to begin to redress that. We want, and need, to do better.
Caring
Returning to my house analogy briefly- if the outside of a house looks shabby, peeling paintwork, dodgy tiles, weeds in the driveway or brickwork, it doesn’t say to a potential owner, ‘I am loved, well looked after. If you live here, you’ll be happy and protected.’ The same can be said of an app that remains untouched- it says to our users ‘We don’t value your experience, your time, how you feel about learning with us.’ Why should a user keep our app on their phone, continue to engage with learning first aid, engage with the Red Cross movement? If we don’t show we care about them, why care about us? Making our app look better is a start in showing our users that we do care. We want to look after and support you. We also take pride in our organisation and the wider movement. We want our products to deliver positive outcomes and experiences for people, to make a difference. They are a reflection of us and our fundamental principles; by neglecting our products we undermine our values.
Communication
Communicating with people has never been easier, but also potentially never more challenging than in the last year. Face to face communication has been stripped away from all of us. We have a plethora of digital alternatives but so many competing channels that you have to stand out, use all the options available to you to reach people and support them. Having an app that you don’t want to or can’t talk about is a huge limitation. 5,000 people a month with no, or very little, promotion- imagine what that could be if we were happy to shout about it? An out-of-date and off brand design means that the app hasn’t been used in social campaigns, marketing materials, workshops, partnerships, funding bids, the list goes on. To keep our products relevant for our users, we have to be able to talk about them. We have to want to talk about them, be proud of them.
Confidence
I’m moving to the kitchen- bear with me. Have you ever looked up a recipe and been faced with two options? Identical ingredients and method but presented totally differently. One is set in Fanny Cradock’s ’70s and not in a cool retro way, the other Insta-friendly Rachel Khoo shabby Swedish chic. Which recipe do you choose to follow? I’m guessing most of us would go for the latter. It will deliver current nutritional values, cooking methods, be social-media friendly and impress your friends and family. But I come back to my first point- the ingredients and method are identical, only the presentation is different. Whether we like it or not, appearance is important and the absence of up-to-date design and UX in our app has the potential to undermine our users’ confidence in our content. If our design looks 10 years old, why would a user trust our content is current and an authority in the first aid education space? Our content is world-leading and our approach to first aid education is simple and easy to understand, but by allowing the design to go untouched, we have failed to recognise that people must feel confident in the product.
So, will the changes we’ve made to our app make it shoot to #1 in the app charts across both app stores? Realistically, no. There is still much to do. Will it start opening a lot more doors? Hopefully, yes. Most importantly, it will support our users more effectively to have confidence in our product, to learn first aid and ultimately, use their newly acquired skills to help others when they need it the most. I can’t think of a better reason to justify a digital ‘lick of paint’.
