You Think Your App is Good. Here’s Why It’s Bad.
That all said, I am perplexed when I still see apps created that don’t have a clue about the user’s behaviors. Nor are they designed into the experience. Instead, companies are designing apps based cool graphical inferences or on what everyone else is doing. Competitor A has social check-in. We should have that. Competitor B has cool icons of products, lets do that. Competitor C lets you use Apple Pay. We will too. Yuck.
What app creators are failing to see is that apps should be developed based on the user’s behaviors and must have the ability to both change as the user interacts with the application and adapt as the behaviors change over time.
Let’s take a step back. This whole post was inspired when down the street from my house, up popped a new Starbucks and next door, a new Smoothie King, both of which I frequent. To date, I’ve not lived close enough to a Smoothie King for me to warrant having their app take up valuable real estate on my iPhone. But now, with one so close, I thought, what the heck, let’s get that sucker downloaded and start getting some value out of my brand loyalty. (Spoiler alert: That app is no longer on my phone.)
I’m motivated by what I need, the ability to satisfy that need is easy and the trigger is having the order button right in the main nav. See? Simple?
To avoid this dreadful scenario, start by asking what behaviors would your customer exhibit while using your app. What needs have to be fulfilled? What actions would you like to see take place? Pay? Reload a card? Use a loyalty card? Participate in a contest? Share the experience? Then, how do we trigger the behavior and transform it into the desired action. In other words, every action should serve a purpose and be relative to the situation. Then, you can reverse engineer the user experience and have it align with the motivations, abilities and triggers necessary to turn behavioral actions into habits.
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