Over the course, there were a number of key themes that surfaced during our dive into the smartphone apps industry.  The first is that data is king – you might have a great idea for an app, but if you have no way of getting the data, it is a lost cause.  As we begun to flesh out our class laundry list of app ideas, we had to carefully and realistically think through data sources and the accessibility of information.  For the First Thursday app, there was a base level of information about venues from the First Thursday website, but this information was outdated in many cases and sparse relative to the actual number of participating venues and high level, so if we moved forward with the app we would have to allot for a good deal of manual information gathering through door-to-door soliciting and cold calls.

Second, the course addressed my initial curiosity around what makes a sticky mobile app and this mostly circled around the app purpose – identifying an app that fulfills a key need and makes sense for people to use on their phones.  For example, a traffic app is very sticky, because it helps drivers save time and frustration by avoiding traffic jams and finding alternative routes.   And people would use it frequently, because traffic patterns and travel destinations are always changing.  Moreover, people don’t always have access to a computer or time to wait for the radio to give us the latest report, so the app makes for a very convenient and handy tool to have in your pocket.  Brad Ellis, our guest speaker from Rogue Sheep also brought up another way to make apps sticky through fresh content –Brad talked about how his team look to build apps like Postage that can easily leverage seasonal content to keep customers coming back for new templates and to help get promoted within the App Store.

Third, we learned a lot about different promotional strategies through our course book and guest speakers.  At the core of this is the app itself and trying to get key real estate in the iPhone app store.  This continues to bewilder me, being a marketer at heart and wanting to believe that fun and innovative plans can draw additional awareness and downloads of the app.  If I were to release an app, I would still try a variety of different tactics, but given the course learnings would first focus on the basics like being discoverable within the app store.  For example, Jim Bricker, who designed the Order Pizza app, discussed how his app went from a handful of downloads to thousands and thousands of downloads once he associated the keyword, “Pizza Hut” with his app, which allowed it to jump to being one of the top apps listed for searches for “pizza” and “pizza hut.” This was echoed by other speakers who work hard to keep their ratings up, determine the right pricing strategy, and strategically time re-releases to try and become more prominent in the app store listings.  Additionally, the design of the icon, screenshots and description, which help an app stand apart from other apps are important marketing elements.  Michael Schneider also discussed the value of directly integrating sharing and rating tools within the app to help spread the word and increase the number of positive ratings.

The fourth key learning, which surfaced from readings, lectures, and close interactions with existing apps, centered on constructing a good user experience.  Leading with the end user in mind versus fancy design or packing an app full of features is necessary to creating an app that is intuitive to use and lets people quickly get to what they need.   This includes little things like ensuring all the buttons are finger-friendly and that any action gives the user feedback (visual or text cues that something is occurring like “Listening” and the circular dial that appears in Shazam).  And this also includes the fundamental information flow through an app, the navigation bar and persistent navigational elements like a back or home button.  Interacting with existing apps, trying to piece together print outs of Yelp’s screen flow and designing our own information flow and screen shots gave me a big appreciation for the challenge of designing intuitive paths that help people through core use cases.

Overall, I think my course goals and learnings shifted from being more theoretical to being more tactical.  I really enjoyed the end to end process of brainstorming and completing an app précis, which allowed us to directly leverage class themes and best practices from our readings and guest speakers.  That being said, surveying the course topics and activities, I can also see how a number of the above learnings can be applied beyond the smartphone world.  If you’re designing or marketing a product or website, you also need to pin point a need, focus on the user experience, and ensure you have essential content necessary.