4 learned lessons on Mobile Design
or why nobody talks about your app
After weeks of hard work your App has hit the iTunesStore. Just in time for the great launch date; in a matter of seconds you log into your iTunesConnect account and click at App Analytics.
You sit and wait. Hit Refresh. Repeat. You see a few downloads. Wait some more. No growing. Wait a day. It’s just the same. Then, after 48 hours you start thinking something is wrong.
It was October of 2014. Six months ago I had became the lead iOS developer for the startup I had Co-Founded with some friends; I had just developed my second iOS App, but the first one to get to the iTunes Store. I had spend the last weeks reading carefully Apple’s iTuneStore Guidelines after the App got rejected twice. This time, I after the confirmation by Apple I though I could take a rest and everything from here would go smoothly. As you might guess, I was wrong.
Every few hours I had a private message from the CEO asking about the metrics of the App, after all, it was the launching date and we had send tons of emails, send tweets and created Facebook posts with the links to the App. The link was also shared with all the contacts from our accelerator.
There I was, hitting refresh at the metrics but the result was not what I expected. I told the CEO that the metrics would take at least 48 hours to display correctly so I thought that would buy me some time. When the deadline approached the results were not different: At least a 20–30 downloads was all we got.
Where was the organic growth? Where was the mouth-to-mouth? What did I did wrong? Damn, I was in trouble.
I tried to explain what happened but I could not. I did several checks on the performance of the App and it was alright. I had no idea what was wrong.
A few days later, one of the Accelerator leaders, called me in. She wanted to tell me that she just had downloaded the App. I smiled, tell her thanks and went back to my seat. She called me again and said: “So… now what am I supposed to do?”. I didn’t understand what she meant.
“What am I supposed to do?” — she asked.
Lesson 1: Make it visible
Help your users to understand
Our App was quite simple, you just pushed a button and the Camera view displayed, then you could scan graphic content to summon an Augmented Reality Experience. When designing the app the CEO asked that it was necessary to reinforce the brand of the company inside our app, the team agree, so we thought it was a good idea to use our logo as the start button. Being that simple to operate, I couldn’t understand when friends couldn’t make it work.
After watching many user’s interactions with the app, I realized that almost everyone — mostly non-tech-focused users — had trouble understanding that our big logo was a button. And they were right, each and every Operative System (Android, iOS, Windows Mobile…) has a particular way to signal actions.
Using certain shapes and colors the users learn that a particular space of the screen has an associated action, when you disrupt that learning by introducing your own way to do things you just confuse your users.
Lesson 2: The Model and Mapping
Don’t make users guess
So you had a big logo in the center and a floating toolbar in the bottom side of the app with 4 buttons: News, FAQ, Contact Us, Settings. At the time, I thought it seemed better (cooler) to leave the icons with no text, as the graphics were self-explanatory. But it wasn’t.
The most important button, after the “Start” one at the logo, was the Newsfeed one, where users could look for new products that had AR Experiences; so we found strange when we got emails asking about new content to later found out that users didn’t know what the newsfeed button was about but didn’t care to push it.
A more familiar cue would have solve that by the time.
Labels are not always necessary, in fact, as Don Norman state in Design of Everyday Things:
“Rule of Thumb: When instructions have to be pasted on something(…) it is badly designed”
As we were introducing a new “idiom” for users to check the newsfeed I should have added a label to the icons to help the users or use a default graphic.
Lesson 3: Feedback
Every action has a reaction
When users could start the AR Camera, some of them got confused about what to do next. At the beginning users had no idea how much time they had wait until they could see the AR experience and other times they got a bit frustrated when scanning a featured content and nothing happened.
The first issue was solved by adding a loading bar, that solved this confusion experienced by the users. The second issue was a bit more difficult because it was hardware related and it was solved by adding a little screen before the camera loaded explaining the amount of light required for the experience to successfully load.
User must always know what is the status of the latest action they did. Is good to remember another important quote from Norman:
“… when people have trouble with something, it isn’t their fault — it’s the fault of the design”
The slow start in the metrics for our app, back in 2014, can’t be just attributed to design issues; but for the few users that downloaded our app this made it difficult for test it, like it and pass the word to their friends. For the particular case of our startup, we got over this issues by educating users about how to use the App on our social networks and displaying a How-To guide for first users. After that, metrics were getting better.
Moral of the story, some re-design to the main idea and concepts for the app were needed leading to the one of the main struggles found on projects: How much are you willing to change from your main idea in order to make your app more user friendly? Which design decisions will you embrace? Have you test your design assumptions with users?
A good design allow users to test your idea, it opens a conversation. This, being the only way to know if they find any value. The ultimate goal of a product.
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At @NinjaRobotCo we apply this design principles in every new project. Looking for a developer to build your next iOS App? Write us at newquest@ninjarobot.co
