Mobile App Development: How to Create a Useful App
These days, it's easy to get caught up in cool, new technology and mobile apps while forgetting about the user. Bethany Poole, group marketing manager at Google, shares how her team focused on user-centric design to create Primer—an app that teaches marketing strategies in fewer than five minutes.
How do you create a useful mobile app? First step: Consider not doing a mobile app
at all. As the team behind the creation of the Google Primer app, that's not easy
for us to say, because we love technology. We love creating new products, we love
innovation, and we love anything that's cutting edge.
Obviously, we're not alone in this love affair. Right now, the Google Play store
alone has over 1.6 million mobile apps, with many more launching each day. And
brands everywhere keep creating new apps—many of which use new, shiny technology
like geolocation, virtual reality, near field communication, and augmented reality.
However, sometimes the newest and shiniest things are also the most blinding. We
like them because they get a lot of buzz, impress award show judges, and make our
brand (and us as marketers) seem trendy and relevant. But there's an inherent
danger to all this.
While we might be creating a "cool" app, we're not necessarily offering a valuable
solution for users. So even if the product is slick and well-designed and gets a
lot of downloads at first, it could be old news two weeks later. Users will have
abandoned it. The press will have moved on. Our business goals won't be met nor
have we helped our target audience in any significant way.
This siren song of technology is something our team struggled with when we first
started working on our app—an educational tool that helps startups, small business
owners, and advertisers learn marketing with five-minute interactive lessons.
Of course, we didn't initially set out to create a mobile app. We merely wanted to
solve a problem for our users: They wanted to learn new skills and keep up with the
latest marketing trends, but it was difficult for them to find the time.
During our early brainstorms, we struggled with our desire to be innovative
groundbreakers and thought leaders. This sent us in several directions. For
example: "What if we created a virtual teaching assistant to accompany our lessons?
Could we have online 'office hours' where teachers would be available 24/7?" All of
our ideas took advantage of technological advancements but ultimately felt like
innovation for innovation's sake, without any meaning or value.
97% of U.S. adults over age 25 don't spend any time learning new skills during
their day.
We realized that we had put the proverbial cart before the horse. We had to stop
thinking about what we wanted to produce in the end, and start thinking about what
our target audience needed right now.
The importance of user-centric design
To create something useful, we had to be user-first.
So we started researching our target audience and their habits more thoroughly. We
found out that 97% of U.S. adults over age 25 don't spend any time learning new
skills during their day.1 We asked our users to find out why.
At first, we received the obvious answers about lack of time and frustration with
learning options. We kept digging until we landed on a deeper user insight: People
viewed education as something so far removed from their everyday lives that they
found it difficult to get into a learning mindset.
That meant our platform couldn't disrupt users' lives. Rather, it needed to be
useful to them in moments they were most open to learning something new.
That is, we had to reach them when they had tiny pockets of downtime—like when they
were waiting for a meeting to start or standing in line for coffee. And what were
people doing in those moments? Looking at their phones.
This helped us decide: If we wanted Primer to be useful for our particular
audience, it had to be a mobile app.
However, if our user research had told us that a website or a classroom seminar
would be the most useful, we would have done that instead … because the user's
needs comes first and the medium second.
How to prioritize usability in design
Our user-centric thinking guided us even as we began developing our app, and taught
us how true innovation happens when usability informs technology. This—along with a
deep dive into the
principles of
mobile app design—helped us take the right steps to design and promote our app
in a way that was relevant to our target audience, including:
-
Think like the user, then design the UX. Initially, we had an
incredible amount of ideas for Primer features. It was overwhelming … until we
let the users' needs guide us. We theorized that people coming to the app would
fall into three types: active users who'd want to find specific lessons quickly,
curious users who'd want to learn something new but haven't settled on a topic
yet, and passive users who'd have no intent at all and just want to browse the
app.
Primer's UX had to be useful for all three types. We added search functionality
so active users could find exactly what they came for, grouped lessons into
generalized categories like "Advertising" and "Content" to help curious users
zero in on a topic, and included a "Featured" section that bubbled up five
recommended lessons for passive users.
-
Remember that users are people, not demographics. Our app is a
B2B tool, so we used business-centric demographics like company size or industry
to determine who our users would be. This caused us to focus only on the startup
community at first, which made sense because this group was thirsty for new
marketing skills and knew exactly what they needed to learn (meaning they would
be in the easy-to-reach active user group). However, after we launched and tested
our minimum viable product (MVP), we saw that our user base had organically grown
to include professionals at big brands. Although these users fell more into the
curious or passive groups, they still shared the same entrepreneurial mindset as
our startup audience.
Because we'd relied solely on business demographics, we hadn't considered this
other audience and had forgotten that we were solving a problem for people, not
companies. So, we redefined our audience to be entrepreneurial marketers in any
type of business and made sure our UX worked harder to help this larger audience
explore and discover new lesson topics.
-
When promoting an app, consider all the situations in which it could be
useful. On the surface, Primer is an app that answers people's marketing
questions. An easy promotional strategy, then, would have been to put Primer in
the moments people have these business questions, like buying search ads for
queries such as, "What does CLV mean?"
But, we realized that many users viewed Primer as a way to pass the time without
wasting time. This opened up a whole new set of marketing opportunities. We
looked for moments where people had a lot of free time and desired a worthwhile
distraction, like the holidays, and launched targeted online ad campaigns during
those time periods.
-
Keep working on the utility of the app even after launch. We
knew that a combination of acquisition and retention would be the key to Primer's
growth. For acquisition, we used content marketing and paid media to get
downloads. Retention, though, ended up being a different challenge. To help,
we've used re-engagement strategies like email and notifications. But the most
important retention strategy we've implemented is UX improvements, i.e., making
sure our app becomes increasingly useful and relevant to our audience.
In the end, our user-centric design helped our B2B app succeed beyond what we had
originally hoped for. After only six months, Primer had 650,000+ downloads, 80,000+
hours spent in-app, and an average 4.5-star user rating on both the App Store and
Google Play.
As we continue to develop other products that will help our target audience, we
often ask ourselves whether every new update or idea should be mobile-first. The
answer is always: Maybe. As long as it's useful to our audience.
Sources
1 Bureau of Labor Statistics, American Time Use Survey,
2014.
