How to design a kickass startup app

The key design goal of any startup is to make sure it solves a problem that your users have.

With Bebril (the startup I am creating through this blog and my vlog) that core problem is to connect with really brilliant people and let their brilliance inspire you to take action and be brilliant yourself. It’s about setting the goals for brilliance and taking real action to accomplish them.

This article will take you through the design goals of Bebril so that you can apply these to your own startup.

The User Journey

Your user will need to be taken through the five key stages of their journey.

• Awareness
• Discovery
• Activation
• Consumption
• Relationship

Awareness

How will your prospective users become aware of your application. While traditionally a marketing question, your app can allow existing users to make their network of friends become aware of the product the more they use your product. For example, if it is a publishing platform that pushes content to existing social networks, when people who read that content will then become aware of your platform.

Discovery

How will your prospective users discover more about your product and learn what it does and if it can solve a problem that they have.

This comes down to the landing page of your site where you need a clear value proposition that leaves no doubt about what problem your product can solve.

Activation

How does a prospective user transition to being an actual user. Do they need to sign up or make a purchase? Make that process as effortless as possible and with the least doubt on the part of your user. They should be excited to use your product.

Consumption

How does your user use your product? Do they use it frequently, or once a month? You want the experience of this to be the best and solve the core problem better than any of your competitors.

Relationship

What does the long term use of your product like? Make sure you’re there to support your users should they have any issues. Monitor their usage patterns and identify if they look like they may be falling out of love with your product. There could be a simple problem you’re not noticing that reaching out to them could be a quick fix, thus making the customer love your product yet again.

Bebril’s User Journey

I won’t go into much detail about the awareness stage in this article as it would mostly be related to marketing. That will come later.

Homepage

The core function of Bebril is to set your goals, identify the people who will help you reach those goals and track your progress through that journey.

The homepage must highlight this very succinctly and the use of a video can help explain the reason why doing this is important (highlighting the problem), how it is easily solved with Bebril, and the benefit (reward) of using it.

Signup

Sign up must be very effortless and for Bebril we will only require a first name to make it personal, an email address for account management and a password to secure the account.

Any other information should be optional and does not need to be requested at signup. Bebril is a free service so there are no payment details required.

During the signup process, it is important to highlight the benefits of the service again to reassure the user of why they are giving their information. It is also beneficial to hint at what is next in the process so they feel like they can get immediate satisfaction for signing up and that it won’t take a lot of effort.

Onboarding

This is a first time process to get the user to follow their first set of tasks to get going with the app. It helps them learn how the app works, but also gives them a feeling of satisfaction of having completed something and worked towards their goal.

Goal management

The goal management aspect of the app will allow them to set goals, track progress and see how well they are doing. It should give a feeling of completion and provide that reward for putting in the effort.

People

In order to help trigger the motivation for working on the steps required to achieve your goals, the use of other people to motivate you and for you to be accountable will be crucial within Bebril. This may be in the form of a mentor relationship or just a friend who will prod you saying … “Hey you haven’t done anything on this in a while, get off your ass and do something”.

By using other individuals we can tap into the variable reward because their behaviour is not predictable. It also gives you the reward of the tribe to push you to complete your steps so you have something to show off.

Audience

While not an initial feature of Bebril, this is where users get have other people follow their journey and they can push out inspirational and motivational content to their audience. Using this content, users should be inspired to take action and work on a step towards their goals.

The HOOK model

Bebril will be based around the HOOK model to get users invested in the platform. There are four key components to this:

• Trigger
• Action
• Reward
• Investment

Trigger

Bebril will primarily have external triggers to start with. These will be in the form of notification via an app and triggers via email. When the user visits their account, there will be visible triggers on their account telling them what actions they need to be working on. For example, if I set up a goal which I have some steps that need to be completed within a week, the trigger will be prompting you to take action via the use of motivational content to inspire you.

Another trigger is using your friend network to send you messages to get you working towards your goals.

Action

In order to take an action we need the trigger (see above), motivation and ability. The motivation will be in the form of inspiration content, showing existing progress and the desire to impress your peers, earn progress points to level up and of course, benefitting from the completion of your goal.

At the time of setting a goal, Bebril can ask the user what they want to tell themselves when they are having a moment of doubt at completing their goal. For example, someone trying to lose weight might want to tell themselves… “Your future grandchildren want to meet you. Don’t let chocolate steal that from you. Don’t die.”

The ability is hard to pinpoint because not everyone is able to work on their goals at that moment in time. We can all make excuses. So Bebril can then support them by asking question the question “What is stopping you completing your goal?”. and then changing that to “What can you do to overcome this?”. Once that answer has been completed, it becomes as new step in the journey to complete your goal.

Reward

Reward will include gamification, the reward of the tribe and the reward of the self. The gamification will be in the form of progress score, reward badges, leveling up and earned inspirational content that you can add to your account.

The reward of the tribe is to be accountable to your network of real people who can push you, and help you overcome the challenges. Having their input gives some variable reward to the journey because they can send you inspirational feedback that sparks the motivation to take action and share your progress back.

The reward of the self is about being brilliant. Bebril will ask you to enter who you were one year ago, who you are today and who you are in one year’s time. You then have to say what you have achieved in the past year so you can always look back and realise how far you have come already and that you are capable of becoming that person in the next year.

Investment

Over time you will become more invested in the solution by giving more time and effort to working with Bebril to achieve your goals. Investment is also in the form of being accountable to others who you start mentoring and the audience that you build to share your brilliance journey with others who are starting out.

The next steps

Stay tuned to see the above user journey be developed into wireframes and then the first version of Bebril.