Cooking an Addictive Mobile App? Here’s the Ingredients You’ll Need
Each day, over 1000 new iPhone apps are released to the world. You will never download any of them, and it is unlikely that they will ever reach the top charts. The App Store is a cruel, unforgiving world. It demands perfection.
The vast majority of new apps meet their demise in a dark sea of Flappy Bird remakes. The lucky ones, who make it through the valley of the shadow of death, typically survive because… people just want to use the app.
But how do you get people to want to use your app?!
Intrinsic Motivation
Now is a good time to introduce Mark Lepper (1944-present), Stanford professor and renowned psychologist who studied motivation. He took a particular interest in intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation.
This is essentially doing something because you want to (intrinsic) vs. doing something for a reward (extrinsic).
Lepper theorized that there are specific ingredients that are present in activities that intrinsically motivate people to complete them. These include enjoyment, interest, control, competence and reasonable chance of success.
Interactive Designers should think about how these ingredients translate to digital experiences, and how to successfully implement them.
Obviously there is no cheat code to develop a popular app, but key steps can be taken to avoid certain failure. For starters, make it enjoyable, interesting, easy to control, possible to “master”, and not unreasonably difficult!
If these ingredients are added, there is a much higher chance that your app separates itself from the other 1000 new apps on the given day it launches.
Let’s look for Lepper’s ingredients in examples from the App Store.
Color Road
If you look at the most popular free games on the App Store, you will come across “Color Road”. Mark Lepper probably loves this one. It has all the ingredients, just like most popular apps.
But let’s just focus on its UX, specifically its control mechanism. The entire game is just touching anywhere on the screen, and sliding from left to right. It doesn’t matter where you touch the screen, it all equally controls your character.
Many times, less is more. In mobile apps, this is a thin line between functionality and simplicity. It’s a balancing act that Color Road got right.
Slither
Slither is a modern take on the snake game for computers. The interactivity it provides users is pure magic, and its success is no surprise.
Players quickly learn the game through observing how fellow snakes interact in the open world. The world is free to explore, and the controls are crisp! The physics of controlling your snake can be “mastered” as you put more time into the game.
This game is a case study on what works well in a mobile gaming experience.
TikTok
We all know how many hours you spend mindlessly swiping through trending videos on TikTok, and we don’t blame you!
Developers ByteDance took the concept of Vine (R.I.P) and truly brought it to new heights, thanks to brilliant interactive design.
When studying TikTok’s design methods, the keywords are crisp and flow. They put the control into the users hands, and make you instantly competent at many features, each accessible through a swipe in a certain direction. It is reminiscent of Snapchat, which is great company to be in.
Fun Run 3
This is another multiplayer game, like Slither, that just knows how to hook an audience. The third installment of Fun Run packs a lot of functionality into very few buttons.
Despite all of the violent action that takes place in the typical “fun” run, the user’s character feels completely in-control of navigating difficult terrain and deploying endless power ups (similar to Mario Kart).
The fact that all of this gameplay is possible with three buttons is mind-boggling.
That’s It?
These are not the only four apps that intrinsically motivate users, if any app is successful, odds are that it is also following Lepper’s ingredients.
Hopefully this article has given you a new perspective on how to get people to want to use your app, and how to look for tasty ingredients in your favorite mobile experiences.
Now start remaking Flappy Birds!
