As some of you might have noticed, over the
recent months I submitted a couple new applications to the Windows Phone Store.
Here I want to reflect on my experience with delivering the first one, Appoint, and even more on the results of this delivery.
How was it a Success
Appoint is actually a very simple thing. Its
key goal is to provide users with a set of additional entry points to default
Windows Phone calendar app, which allow to create appointments (or reminders,
as I see them) a bit quicker than through the built-in facilities. This is
achieved through giving user several customizable shortcuts to pin to the start
screen. For example you might want to be able to quickly create appointments
for 11 p.m the next day – for this purpose you will tune the "tomorrow" shortcut setting
proper time and duration and pin it to the start screen. Then, whenever you
wish to create a reminder for tomorrow you just click this shortcut and it
opens calendar’s screen where you need only fill in the appointment title and
press ‘ok’. The idea is trivial and when faced with it for the first time I
thought that such an app would save me from the need to pick proper date and
time again and again when creating simple reminders in the calendar – and it
really does save time.
The simplicity of the app was the key reason
for me to take it into production. By the time the idea came to me I already
gained some experience with the platform through the attempts to create Arithmo – the app that should have been my first one. However, in January I
still had a couple things to complete before Arithmo could be shipped: UI and
some artwork. Because I suck at both and was really scared of the work needed
to make the app nice and easy to play with, I have easily jumped away from it
to the new goal. At the same time, I was quite determined to push Arithmo to
the market as well and this put me under certain constraints in terms of time.
As a result, I decided that it is a good idea to try to deliver an app in one
month – the goal looked both quite ambitious and achievable. So, right after
checking that all aspects of the Appoint idea are actually implementable, I set
up a deadline and promised myself that no later than in a month my calendar
application will be submitted to the store.
On January 19th I made my first
commit to the app’s repository and at night on February 14th the
package was sent to Microsoft for certification. I didn’t earn $100 in 24 hours, neither have I completed something enormous over the month, but this
was a success. I have finally jumped out of the pit of hoping to produce
something and deliver it to the public on my own and found myself in a world
where I can not only set deadlines, but actually stick to them. It felt
awesome.
How was it a Failure
The only problem with Appoint was that it
became a miserable failure from the market’s point of view. While the app is
still downloaded from time to time, the stream is very slow – something about 1
installation over 2-3 days. With the current 50some installs this means that
over the next 3 months it won’t even reach 100 total downloads. The word
failure in fact does not seem to be descriptive enough for this situation.
Apart from the sad fact that I failed to secure
any significant users mass for Appoint, I also didn’t get much feedback. If one
checks the app in the marketplace they will see a single 5 star rating on it –
the one that I left myself. This means that none of the 50 users who downloaded
Appoint chose to rate it or leave some review. In the context of mobile apps
this is very bad: an application without ratings won’t see much
downloads simply because potential users won’t have a chance to come across it
in the store. Here I don’t mean that I didn’t get any 4 or 5 star ratings – I got
no single negative one as well. That is, apart from the review posted by
Ron Lunsford I haven’t seen any feedback, which could help me locate
problems and fix them to make the thing better.
Finally, the review by Ron made me see
one thing clear: I completely failed to communicate the idea of my app to
potential users. The descriptions in the Store and on the website neither
manage to show the benefits, which one might get from Appoint, nor engage
Windows Phone users into trying it. Furthermore, the app’s UI itself hardly
helps user utilize it in an efficient way or maybe even prevents him or her
from understanding what to do with the thing.
Another point that the review revealed to me is
even more important. From how Ron described and used the app I can draw one
very simple conclusion: the ways people want to use calendar on their phone
might be different from how I interact with it and thus offer little room for a
utility like Appoint. Moreover, most of the things included into the app didn’t
draw the reviewer’s attention – and likely they weren’t found by other users or
were not beneficial to them.
Why did it end up this way
Now let’s not burst into tears and analyze the
reasons behind Appoint’s poor performance in the market. First and most
important, when starting the project I was not sure
if anybody shares my views on the phone’s calendar, appointments and reminders
and hence can benefit from the app. I simply spotted a thing that I could
implement and use myself, but it may be the case that the actual value brought
by the application is minimal. To be honest, I myself use it in a very limited
way and now I can see that Appoint could hardly become a first-class app for
most people, and even for those who will find it helpful most features can’t be
relevant like they are not important for me. This all boils down to the fact
that any application should provide enough value to users – as long as we want
it to be popular. Just taking an appealing and implementable idea won’t bring
one far in terms of market success unless the idea is really clear, simple and
relevant to a significant number of customers. For a developer this should mean
that once one decides to create something they should analyze it deeply, try to
get an unbiased view and estimate the target audience. Only if the results of
this research are satisfactory it is safe to start development. This of course
applies only to the products pursuing success in the form of paycheck or
popularity and that’s obviously not the only possible goals for developers. For
me success was more of a dream than a goal – main objective was to create the
app and push it to the store under certain time constraints. With this mindset
I by no means could accurately assess the market potential of my app.
Beside the lack of initial verification of the
idea I also made some design mistakes. Particularly, despite the fact that in a recent post I mentioned the risk of losing control over the product’s
features set, I have actually committed this crime with Appoint. The main
screen of the app hosts quite a lot of tiles whose purpose is not that clear,
shortcuts customization is hidden and the value of some of the things built
into the app is doubtful. Maybe even dropping two thirds of the shortcuts from
the main screen would make the first encounter with the app easier for users.
In the end, I use only three or four of them.
The mechanisms that I use to engage users and
help them understand the purpose of the app are very old and quite inefficient
– lots of text. There is plenty of reasons for my descriptions to be useless – particularly, the quality of language and poor explanations. Although,
what is more important, texts are boring and the more of them you throw at your
users the more they will think that the app itself is boring. Instead of trying
to fit as many explanatory paragraphs as possible into a screen we should look
for more appealing and entertaining ways of educating our users, which would
make them want to play with the product, not show them how complex it is to handle.
As for the lack of ratings and feedback, the
only way in which I tried to get them was including a pretty standard popup,
which will jump at users each 10th launch of the app and ask to rate
it. One of its drawbacks is that it works only if some users do return to the
app and this doesn’t seem to be the case with Appoint. Besides, even if someone
sees this dialog they can easily ignore it and there is no reasonable way to
change this without annoying users. Thus, the only viable way to get reviews
from inside the app is to build a product that will attract users, keep them
interested for some time and bring them strong emotions – in this case they
might decide to pay developer with their precious time and rate or review the
application. On the other side, since ratings come only to those apps, which
are downloaded, there is little surprise in the lack of reviews for Appoint.
This brings us to my most serious failure – the
lack of marketing. To break the above circle one has to draw some attention to
the app from the outside. The only marketing effort that I put into Appoint was
setting up a website, posting several tweets and mentioning it on my LinkedIn
and Google+ pages. This couldn’t have had any significant effect simply because
I don’t have much followers in any of these social networks and most of those
who follow me are not really interested in Windows Phone apps. What I should
have done instead is aggressively advertising my app in various groups and forums for
Windows Phone developers and users, but I was simply scared of appearing
somewhere and inviting people to try my product. One source of this fear was my
suspicion that the app is not that useful and hardly anybody will admire it.
However, more importantly, I was simply afraid of claiming ownership of
something in front of many people and looking like a freak who is able to code,
but can not bring any real value. That’s what I must fight and the fact that it
isn’t easy for me to overcome this fear might be my most important takeaway from this affair. In the end
So, making an application a failure is not that
difficult. However, if like for most of us this is not the key goal for you, you should
work hard in two areas. First, be sure to explain yourself and your users what are the benefits brought
by your product and make sure it is nice, useful and simple to handle. Second, let as much
people as possible know about it so that they can admire what you have done and
spread word to others. Neither of these tasks is simple, but making life better
for scores of users is definitely worth the effort.
Have you ever seen
your application in the bottom of a store with zero reviews? Or maybe
everything you ship always hits the highest positions in app ratings? Please
share your experience and tell what were your mistakes or which routines do you follow to create successful apps!
