Are you ‘appy?

It’s a serious question – what makes a good app? As consumers we leave it to our emotions to tell our sub-conscious the answer.

Think about it, if you don’t like or enjoy the experience that an app gives you, the automatic reaction is that it isn’t a good app. That’s bad news for the consumer and for the app developer. However, the opposite is true. Provide a good experience or UX (see my other blog on this) and that forms a great app.

Before you get thinking about the experience that the app will give your users, you have to think about what is the app going to do. What is the core objective? What problem does it solve? And here is where the good apps rise above the bad ones…

You see there is so much information out there and so many questions to answer. However we see what we want to see and we only want to know the answers to the questions we pose. So when we open an app, we really only have one question that we want answering.

It could be I want to know the latest news (BBC app). I want to know what my friends are doing (Facebook). I want to catch up with a group of friends (WhatsApp). I want to search and buy something quickly as a gift (Amazon)…I could go on forever. These apps are some of the most successful around and they have one thing in common. They answer a question, a single objective really well and the UX is exceptional. Sure you can do other things within them but the key objective is crystal clear.

Further evidence of this is the suite of apps that ‘Sky’ have. Sky realised very early on that they had a number of consumers with different needs (questions) to meet (answers). They had people that wanted to know the latest news (Sky News App); the latest sport (Sky Sports App); view and record listings (Sky+ App) and; watch on the go (Sky Go App).

The legal industry is absolutely no different and that is exactly why I build specific apps for specific sectors. A personal injury client doesn’t want to see information relating to conveyancing and vice versa. Even if they had the need for a conveyancing solicitor, it is far more effective and user friendly to have a separate app to deal with each legal service they need, just like Sky do for their customers.

If you are considering a mobile app for your firm, give serious consideration to the problem you are looking to solve. Don’t disregard the user experience and graphics but it is secondary to the objective and purpose of the app itself.